English-born Boutwood (1856 ? - 1941) studied at the Royal Academy then under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury before coming to Chicago.  His residences and studios were as follows: 240 Wabash Ave. (1888); 816 Temple Court (1889); Tree Studio Bldg. (1897); 1234 Farwell Ave. (1898-99); Hinsdale, IL (1921).  Besides helping to organize the Chicago Society of Artists, Boutwood became an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he exhibited regularly between 1888 and 1922.  From the titles listed in the exhibition record, one may conclude that Boutwood specialized in genre painting and landscape. Wilson Irvine was one of his students in 1895.  At the World’s Columbian Exposition he exhibited Portrait of the Hon. Charles B. Farwell (Private collection) and his sentimental portrait of a woman holding her dreamy-eyed little son, called In Wonderland won the Young Fortnightly Prize in 1898.  Boutwood also won the Municipal Art League Prize in 1906 and the Chicago Society of Artists’ Silver Medal in 1913.  Two paintings exhibited that year at the Art Institute indicate a trip to Etaples.  Soon after establishing himself there around 1910, he began to receive fellow artists, including Henry Ossawa Tanner and Myron Barlow at his villa called La Braudière. The Brauer Museum in Valparaiso, Indiana has Boutwood’s Fishing Boats at Low Tide and his La Canche at Etaples is in the Musée de la Marine at Etaples. Women in a Meadow, regarded as a late work, was reproduced recently (Lesage, 2007, p. 154).

Sources:
Clarkson, Ralph. “Chicago Painters: Past and Present.” Art and Archaeology 12 (September-October 1921): 129-144; Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World’s Fair. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993, p. 210; Lesage, Jean-Claude. Peintres Américains en Pas-de-Calais: La Colonie d’Etaples. A. M. M. E. Editions, 2007.

Submitted by Richard H. Love and Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D.