Theodore Earl Butler (American, 1861-1936). Boating on the Epte, 1911. Oil on canvas. 25-1/2 x 32 inches (64.8 x 81.3 cm...

Description

Theodore Earl Butler (American, 1861-1936)
Boating on the Epte, 1911
Oil on canvas
25-1/2 x 32 inches (64.8 x 81.3 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: T.E. Butler / 1911

PROVENANCE:
R.H. Love Galleries, Inc, Chicago, Illinois;
Private collection, Memphis, Tennessee;
Private collection, Hernando, Mississippi.

EXHIBITED:
The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, and elsewhere, "Theodore Earl Butler: Emergence from Monet's Shadow, Impressionism from Giverny and New York," June 15, 1985-July 6, 1996, no. 18.

The American impressionist Theodore Earl Butler, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to Paris to study art, established the closest connection of any American painter with the great French impressionist master Claude Monet. During the 1880s, when impressionism was beginning to catch on with American collectors, and seem less radical an approach (painting directly from nature outside, and employing broken brushwork), a greater number of artists embraced the style. Butler was among these artists, a group which also included, among others, John Leslie Breck, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Willard Metcalf, Lilla Cabot Perry and Theodore Robinson. Butler went to paint at the artists' colony of Giverny, where Monet had moved in 1883, and built his fabulous garden that provided so much inspiration for his landscape paintings. There, the two men became fast friends. Butler began painting landscapes under the influence of Monet, and in due course Butler married Monet's stepdaughter, Suzanne Hoschedé, an event immortalized in a painting entitled The Wedding March (1892) by Theodore Robinson. Butler and Suzanne bought an orchard near Monet's home and studio where they built a house and raised a family. After Suzanne's untimely death he married her sister, Marthe Hoschedé.

The effect of Butler's connection with Monet is apparent in the present work of 1911, a lyrical scene of boaters on the river Epte near Giverny. The site is one Monet himself explored extensively, in a ravishing series of 21 canvases he produced in 1896-97 entitled Morning on the Seine. Every morning Monet would rise before dawn, and make his way across roads and fields towards the confluence of the Epte and the Seine, not far from his home. Rowing the short distance from the shore, he would board his Bateau-atelier and set off downstream to a specific bend in the river where he sought to capture the effects of the brightening sky, the gauzy shapes at the juncture of the confluence, the trees lining the banks in shadow while also reflecting in the water.

Compositionally, Butler's Boating on the Epte owes a powerful debt to Monet's Matinée sur la Seine of 1896 (Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1996, vol. III, no. 1436, illustrated p. 594). Notably, the shapes of the massed trees at left and right, and the design of the negative space running vertically through the painting from the sky to the water in the foreground are very similar to Monet's work. But by 1911, Butler was also aware of Post-Impressionist experiments, and the works of the Fauves such that his view of the magical confluence has a more saturated, almost "straight out of the tube" pigmentation in the blues and greens. The brushwork is also less broken and flickering, opting instead for a lusher coalescence to achieve zones of deeply intense, jewel-like color. In this way, Butler moved beyond Monet into his own idiom.

Theodore Earl Butler was the son of Courtland Philip Livingston Butler (1813-1891) and Elizabeth Slade Pierce (1822-1901). His son, James Butler, was also a painter, and as the grandson of Claude Monet, was one of only four painters to have painted in Monet's garden in Giverny. His sister Mary Elizabeth Sheldon, née Butler (1849-1897), is the paternal great grandmother of U.S. President George H. W. Bush and the great-great grandmother of U.S. President George W. Bush.


More information about Theodore Earl Butler. See also: Butler, Theodore Earl, Butler, Theodore, Butler, Theodore E. Artist.



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