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1817-1894
American (Hoboken, New Jersey)
James Edward Buttersworth was the son of the British marine painter Thomas Buttersworth. He was born in 1817 on the Isle of Wight in England and immigrated to the United States around 1847. He worked for the lithographer Nathaniel Currier, and later for Currier & Ives, which disseminated Buttersworth’s work to a wide audience. During the 1850s Buttersworth made his name as a painter of clipper ships, then the fastest vessels on the sea. As steamships gradually began to replace clippers in the 1860s and 1870s, Buttersworth turned increasingly to yachting as his primary subject, which was emerging as a popular Gilded Age pastime. He recorded many America’s Cup races as well as individual yachts and harbor scenes.
Buttersworth is considered one of the foremost American marine painters of the 19th century. His work transcends the typical static ship portraits or pier head paintings, for he breathed life into the vessels he painted and placed them in naturalistic, ever-changing seas and weather conditions. Although trained in his native England, Buttersworth’s reputation was made in America, and today his work is appreciated alongside that of other great American marine painters of the time such as Robert Salmon, Fitz Henry Lane, and William Bradford.
