Theodore Butler
1861-1936
Theodore Earl Butler was one of America’s most innovative Post-Impressionist painters. Butler did not receive the recognition he deserved in his lifetime.
Butler was born in 1861. He began his training as a student at the Art Students League in New York City in 1882 with William Merritt Chase. Finishing his studies, Butler moved to Paris where he exhibited in Salon de Paris in 1888, and won an Honorable Mention for the painting, “La Veuve”. After this reward, Butler had some important one-man exhibitions at Vollard and Bernheim Jeune in Paris, and Durand Ruel in New York.
He studied in various art academies in Paris, including studies under Claude Monet. In July 1892, he married Suzanne Hoschede-Monet, Claude Monet’s stepdaughter. Butler was strongly influenced by the French Impressionists. When his first wife passed away, Butler would eventually marry a second of Monet’s stepdaughters. Like Monet, Butler actively painted the landscape near Giverny and his home was well known as a gathering place for expatriate artists.
In the summer of 1888, he discovered Giverny, the village that was to become the impressionist artists’ colony. Initially inspired by Monet, Butler surpassed the impressionist aesthetic. Using the French painter’s high-keyed palette as a springboard, he developed his own technique, and a style that forecasts elements of the Nabi movement, such as the simplification of forms, a use of pronounced contours, and flattened spatial effects.
Still tied to impressionist subject matter, Butler applied his own vivid, energy-charged brushwork, striking color, highly saturated pigment, and boldly executed compositions that anticipate the canvases of Matisse. The prestigious Vollard Gallery hosted a one-man show for Butler in 1897. However, French critics classified his art as imitative of Monet. Butler traveled to New York, where he executed the innovative “Brooklyn Bridge”, which was very well received.
Henceforth, Butler turned from genre scenes to landscape painting. He expanded his virtuoso brushwork, Fauve-like color, fluid line, and abstraction of form. As an innovator, Butler took part in the Armory Show in Chicago, in 1913, and then sent works to the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco two years later. Great dealers such as Le Barc de Boutteville, Vollard, and Bernheim-Jeune recognized Butler’s innovations but. Butler, while remaining in the famous village, chose a more avant-garde path as he would become a leading American post-impressionist. Only recently has his proper place in the history of American art been affirmed.
