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Alfred Hutty

(Grand Haven, MI, 1877 - 1954, Woodstock, NY)

Alfred Hutty was born in Grand Haven, Michigan in 1877. He came to Charleston in 1919 when he was already in his early forties and immediately cabled his wife “Come quickly. Have found heaven.” Having worked as a stained glass designer in Kansas City and at Tiffany Glass Studios in New York, Hutty had begun a long association with the Woodstock, NY art community and with Lowell Birge Harrison, who was also a mentor of fellow Charleston artist Alice R.H. Smith. Indeed, even after he moved to Charleston, Hutty maintained a studio in Woodstock until his death in 1954. Primarily an oil and watercolor painter, Hutty apparently did not seriously take up etching until he moved to Charleston but quickly demonstrated his complete mastery of the medium, winning awards all over the country. All the while, he continued to paint in oils and watercolors, and also produced hundreds of pencil drawings and sketches. Alfred Hutty was one of the founding members of the Charleston Etcher’s Club. He was active in the Footlight Player’s Workshop in Charleston and painted murals for several public buildings Alfred Hutty was a master painter and printmaker whose evocative landscapes and realistic studies of the human condition represent the best aspects of the Woodstock and Charleston art traditions of his era. Among the first artists to settle in the Art Students League colony at Woodstock, New York, in the early 1900s, Hutty established himself as a leading painter of the town's natural environs. For more than a decade, he honed his skills in oil and watercolor, producing intimate portrayals of Woodstock's mountains, lakes, and streams before his career took him to South Carolina. Hutty first visited Charleston in 1920 and, according to one of the staple legends of the Charleston Renaissance, he excitedly wired his wife back in Woodstock: "Come quickly, have found heaven." Hutty began dividing his time seasonally between homes and studios in Charleston and Woodstock, teaching art classes for the Carolina Art Association at what is now the Gibbes Museum of Art—a relationship that eventually led to the Gibbes's status as the largest public repository of Hutty's work. In Charleston, Hutty was inspired to try his hand at printmaking for the first time, and it is this artistic medium for which he is best known. His skillful prints depicting the city's surviving colonial and antebellum architecture, its rural environs, and its African American population drew unprecedented national attention both to Hutty and to Charleston.