A central figure in the Charleston Renaissance, Alfred Hutty was born in Grand Haven, Michigan. He grew up in Kansas City and Leavenworth, Kansas, earning an art scholarship at the age of fifteen. He worked as a stained glass designer in Kansas City and St. Louis, where he attended the St. Louis School of Art. Inspired by the landscape art of Birge Harrison, Hutty determined to devote himself to painting and, in 1907, traveled to Woodstock, New York to study under Harrison. He established himself as a regular resident of the Art Students League summer art colony there. During this time, he continued design and production of stained glass for Tiffany Studios in New York City.

Hutty first visited Charleston in 1919, looking for a place to spend the winter, when he famously wired his wife, back in Woodstock: "Come quickly, have found heaven." He returned to the city from 1920 to 1924 to teach at the school of the Gibbes Museum and thereafter divided his time seasonally between homes and studios in Charleston and Woodstock. In Charleston, he embraced the friendship, collaboration, and activities of local printmakers and other cultural leaders, such as John Bennett and DuBose Heyward, whose 1936 novel, {Lost Morning}, features an artist modeled after Hutty. He began etching in Charleston in 1921 and was a founding member of the Etchers’ Club in 1923. Hutty earned a national reputation as a printmaker in the 1920s and the following decades.

Hutty's work reveals his varied artistic roots in the social realism of the Midwest, as well as the picturesque landscape traditions of Woodstock and Charleston. He produced numerous street views of Charleston's high-style and vernacular architecture.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

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