Sutton, Ruth Haviland

Ruth Haviland Sutton (September 10, 1898 - November 23, 1960) was an American printmaker, pastel portraitist, and oil painter. She was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and began her training as an artist at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Museum and School of the Arts starting in 1924. (That year would also see her first visit to Nantucket, where she visited in order to study with Frank S. Chase, under whose tutelage she became an accomplished painter.) She also studied at Grand Central School of Art in New York City, and with Jerry Farnsworth in Florida. She studied printmaking with George C. Miller in New York and attended the Art Students League in New York City to learn drawing and anatomy from George Bridgman and sculpture from Mahonri Young. As a working, professional artist, she received commissions in the 1930s from the Works Progress Administration to paint murals at the Museum of Natural History in her hometown - before she relocated permanently to Nantucket. There, she applied her lithographic skills to decorative prints of Nantucket scenes, which she published and sold as a series of printed postcards. Her work also included a famous pictorial map of Nantucket and a montage of Nantucket attractions. Sutton was a founding member of The Boston Printmakers and was active in the Springfield Artists Guild and the Springfield Art League. She became one of the most active artists, and ardent promoters, of the Nantucket Art Colony, and shared her success with other artists by purchasing, refurbishing, and affordably renting four waterfront properties to artists. She died - in Nantucket - on November 23, 1960.