Dewitt Clinton Boutelle (1820-1884)

Hudson River School painter Dewitt Clinton Boutelle, who was most likely named after New York mayor DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828), was largely a self-taught and itinerant landscape and portrait painter. He was born in scenic Troy, New York, and later lived in New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. By the time Boutelle turned twenty, his paintings were celebrated, particularly his views of Niagara Falls, and shown at the National Academy of Design, where he was elected an Associate in 1851, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Art Association, the Boston Athenaeum, the Washington Art Association and the American Art-Union. He was influenced early in his life by prominent artists Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, and actually created a full-sized copy of Cole’s “Voyage of Life” series in 1863.

Contact Vose about this artist

Read more about this artist...

Boutelle’s New York landscapes are included in the Karolik Collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Adirondack Museum, New York, the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, and the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. 

References: See Falk, Who Was Who in American Art (1999); Driscoll, John, All That Is Glorious Around Us: Paintings from the Hudson River School (New York: Cornell Press, 1997); Mandel, Patricia, C. F., Fair Wilderness: American Paintings in the Collection of the Adirondack Museum, (Blue Mountain Lake, New York: The Museum, 1990).