Claire Shuttleworth

(1868-1930)

The latter half of the 1980s and early 1990s seems to have been the period for the discovery of American women painters, with exhibitions focused strictly on this subject and collectors seeking only women artists. The Grand Central Gallery had a show entitled “The Genius of the Fair Muse,” and, although I’m not sure I fully grasp its deeper meaning, it certainly revealed numerous artists heretofore unknown to me, as did many other similar efforts of that era. With my acknowledged weakness for harbor and coastal imagery, especially of Cape Ann, I was stopped dead in my tracks by an amazing painting incorrectly titled Gloucester—when it’s really Rockport—that displayed a solidity, a firmness that (pardon me) I didn’t anticipate in the work of a woman artist. I had absolutely never heard of her before, but I could not walk away from it. I approached Jim Cox, the gallery director, and whined, cried poor, and basically begged for a break . . . and got one spread over the next few months. Shuttleworth was a Buffalo artist who achieved acclaim for her paintings of Niagara Falls and lived for a time in Rockport. I’ve only seen an occasional small oil study since 1987, when I purchased this piece, and a photo of an amazing painting of a skyscraper under construction from the perspective of the upper floors—a very bold picture as I recall. Other than this, nothing. As testament to the strength of this painting, in two separate exhibitions of many Cape Ann pictures I own, this painting was selected for newspaper pho- tos and write-ups of the shows, over many bigger- name artists such as Hibbard, Mulhaupt, Theime, and Kuehne. Now tell me again that women artists don’t paint as boldly as men!