Shurtleff, Roswell Morse

Roswell Morse Shurtleff (June 14, 1838 - January 6, 1915) was an American painter and illustrator. Born in Rindge, New Hampshire, Shurtleff studied at Dartmouth College and the Lowell Institute in Boston. He briefly managed an architect's office in Manchester, New Hampshire before moving to Buffalo and working as a lithographer in 1858-1859. Afterwards, he returned to New England and briefly lived in Winchendon, Massachusetts, where he drew a view of the town that was later printed by J. H. Bufford. He then moved to New York City to attend the Academy of Design. At the start of the U.S. Civil War, Shurtleff volunteered with the 99th New York Volunteers, later the 99th New York Infantry Regiment, which, despite its name, functioned like a Coast Guard unit. Shurtleff was captured very early in the conflict (by one account he was the first Union officer to be taken prisoner after being shot) and spent eight months in a Confederate prison, where he was asked to design a flag for Gen. Beauregard's daughter that later influenced the design of the Confederate flag. After the war, he married Clara Eugenia Halliday and moved to Hartford, Connecticut before returning to New York City by the mid-1870s. During these years, he worked as an illustrator for magazines, books, and newspapers, and later shifted to paintings, typically of animals and landscapes, for which he is best known. Shurtleff worked in a variety of methods and media, including sketches, oil, watercolor, lithography, and photogravure. By the late 1880s, Shurtleff was recognized as one of the premier American landscape painters of the day, if fairly conservative and conventional in his approach. He was an active member of the National Academy of Art and the National Academy of Design.