Roswell Morse Shurtleff

Roswell Morse Shurtleff (1838-1915)

(“A Hartford Biography”)

© Gary W. Knoble, 2014

Roswell Morse Shurtleff was a master painter of romantic Adirondack Forest interiors. While he only lived in his wife’s native Hartford from 1867 to 1875, they were his formative years as a painter. Influenced by the vibrant art culture of the city, he took up painting at a relatively late age, and eventually earned a reputation as one of the finest of the late Hudson River School painters. Hartford was happy to claim him as one of her own.

Shurtleff was born on June 14, 1838 in Rindge, New Hampshire. His father was Asahel Dewey Shurtleff and his mother Eliza Morse Shurtleff. His grandfather Asahel Shurtleff from Ellington, Connecticut, fought in the Revolution. One of his ancestors, William Shirecliffe, emigrated from Yorkshire, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1628.

Shurtleff was an illustrator, a lithographer, and finally a painter. According to H. W. French he was painting as a child before he could read and his pictures were the pride of his family. He is said not to have seen a “picture of an merit” before age 21. This was probably in Boston where he moved in 1859.

He attended Dartmouth College until 1857. Some sources say he graduated, but others say he did not. The latter is more probable since he received an honorary B. S. degree from Dartmouth in 1882. He left Dartmouth to be an architect’s assistant in Manchester, New Hampshire. In 1858 he visited his beloved Adirondacks for the first time. Around this time he moved to Buffalo, New York to work as a lithographer. In 1859 he moved to Boston, drawing on wood for engravers and attending the Lowell Institute. He moved to New York City in 1960 where he worked as a magazine illustrator, became an Associate in the National Academy of Design, and attended the National Academy Antique School.

Upon the outbreak of the Civil War in April of 1861 he volunteered for the New York 99th Regiment. He was wounded and taken prisoner in July, reputed to have been the first Union officer to have been wounded and taken prisoner in that war. He spent eight months in prison and then returned to New York, continuing his work as an illustrator. One of his first illustrations was a cover for Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”.

On June 13, 1867 he and Clara E. Halliday of Hartford were married in nearby Collinsville. After the marriage he relocated to Hartford, then a major publishing center, to work as a designer for the American Publishing Company. In 1870 he did several illustrations for Mark Twain’s “Innocent’s Abroad” and in 1871 he did the illustrations for Twain’s “Roughing it”. Some of his illustrations were also used in the first edition of Twain’s “A Tramp Abroad”.

In addition to being a publishing center, Hartford was also becoming a center for the visual arts. The rapidly growing economy supported a vibrant art scene that had attracted several artists, many of them Hartford born. While most of them are obscure today, the length of the list is impressive for such a small city. Those living and painting in Hartford in the 1870’s included Truman Howe Bartlett, Robert Bolling Brandegee, Charles DeWolf Brownell, Henry Bryant, William Gedney Bunce, James Wells Champney, William Bailey Faxon, John Lee Fitch, Karl Gerhardt, S. M. Hedges, Nelson Augustus Moore, Charles Ethan Porter, Reginald T. Sperry, John W. Stancliff , Dwight William Tryon, Daniel Wentworth, William Ruthven Wheeler, George Frederick Wright, and John Edward Wylie. In 1868 the 20 year old Charles Noel Flagg, ten years younger that Shurtleff, also moved to Hartford.

Surrounded and inspired by these artists, Shurtleff began painting in oils and opened a studio in the new Charter Oak Building on Main Street, where many of these artists were also painting. He said he was particularly influenced by the paintings of Fitch whom he later acknowledged as the “discoverer” of the Adirondacks. In 1871 Shurtleff, Fitch and young Tryon began traveling together to the Keene Valley in the Adirondacks to paint. They were often joined there by Alexander Wyant, James David Smilie, Julien Alden Weir, Winslow Homer, and Samuel Coleman.

Several of these Hartford painters began to discuss the need for a regular exhibition venue and a school for teaching design and the creation of fine arts. Few cities in the United States had such schools at that time. These discussions led to the creation of the Hartford Art Association in 1872 with Shurtleff as a founding member. On August 8, 1872, the Hartford Courant reported that the state legislature had officially chartered the Hartford Art Association’s Connecticut School of Design. The Corporators of the school were the Governor of Connecticut, Marshall Jewell; the Mayor of Hartford, Henry C. Robinson; and the artists Wright (the President of the Hartford Art Association), Tryon, and Wheeler. The officers of the school were Wheeler, President; Stancliff, Vice President; Hedges, Treasurer; and Tryon, Secretary. The governing council included Shurtleff, Sperry, Bartlett, and Wright.

In 1872 Shurtleff also began to exhibit at the National Academy of Design.

While hopes for the new art school were high, it apparently had a difficult time attracting members. In June of 1873, the Courant reported that the second annual exhibition and sale had drawn a very small crowd and only two pictures were sold. Shurtleff’s last reported involvement was in 1874 when he was still a council member. The last Courant mention of the organization was in 1877.

The Shurtleffs moved from Hartford to New York City sometime in late 1874 or early 1875. Records show that he lived at 350 West 55th Street from 1875 until his death in 1915. He also built a summer house in Keene Valley, New York.

While he no longer lived in Hartford, he visited and exhibited there often. In 1880 he held an exhibition and auction in the Cheney Building in the rooms of the Decorative Art Society. An article in the Courant in 1883 hoped he would participate in an upcoming exhibition of Hartford artists with his painting “Autumn Gold” that had received so much praise when it was exhibited at the National Academy show in 1880. This painting is said to have won him the title of Associate of the National Academy. The purpose of this exhibition was to revive the Connecticut School of Design, “or something analogous”. In 1884 the Courant announced, “A new painting by Mr. R. M. Shurtleff has been placed in E. L. Smyth’s studio in the rear of Butler’s art store where it will remain for a short time”. As late as 1884 Shurtleff was still called, “the artist of New York and Hartford”. In 1890 the Courant published comments from the New York Truth praising Shurtleff’s most recent painting of the Adirondacks. “As I have stated, Shurtleff is of a retiring and unpretentious nature. But several Englishmen have seen this remarkable picture and as they are taking strong efforts to have it sent to the London Royal Academy, possibly the notice his work must inevitably command there may bring Mr. Shurtleff into a prominence that he had heretofore shunned.” In 1896 the Courant announced that a painting of Shurtleff’s had been purchased by the Springfield Art Museum. In May of 1904 the Art Committee of the Hartford Club, of which Flagg was member, invited Shurtleff to exhibit there. “Mr. Shurtleff formerly lived here and his first start of art was made in Hartford. Many of his pictures are owned in this city and state and he makes frequent visits here.“ The Hartford Club showed another of his paintings in 1908. In 1913 Shurtleff showed a painting in third exhibition of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts. The Courant reviewer noted, “Shurtleff, who has the reputation of being the best painter in the country of interiors of forests, has a small canvas called ‘the Sunlit Woods,’ showing the interior of a wood in the strong light filtering down from above which accentuates a part of the interior and emphasizes the darkness of the rest.”

Shurtleff was a member of the American Watercolor Society, and the Salmagundi Club.

He died in New York City on January 6, 1915. The notice of his death in the Courant stated that he had died entering a drug store at 55th Street and Columbus Avenue on and errand for his wife. They had no children.

His paintings are held in many museums including the Springfield Art Museum and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Oddly, Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum is not among them.

artprice.com, Roswell Morse Shurtleff (1838-1915)

Dearinger, David B. (Editor), “Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of The National Academy of Design Volume I, 1826-1925”, 2004, page 505

French, H. W. “Art and Artists in Connecticut”, 1879, Page 146

Gerdts, William H., “The East and the Mid-Atlantic, Art Across America, Two Centuries of Regional Painting, 1710-1920”, 1990, page 182-183

Hartford Courant, 1/9/1873, 6/14/1873, 1/23/1884, 5/1/1896, 3/5/1890, 8/7/1901, 5/19/1904, 1/13/1913, 1/7/1915,

national academy.org, Roswell Morse Shurtleff (1838-1915)

The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume X, 1900, page 379

www.twainquotes.com,m chapter 12

New York Times, 1/7/1915, “R.M. SHURTLEFF DEAD”

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain, 1993, page 384