Known as an organizer and a successful fundraiser, Howard Russell Butler divided his time between careers in art and in commerce. Repeatedly, his business skills were used to benefit the New York artistic community in its search for patronage, exhibition space, and permanent quarters.
In 1865 Butler's family moved from New York to Yonkers, New York, where at the age of fourteen he began drawing lessons under William Shannon. His parents were Fellows of the National Academy--that is contributors to its building fund--and he used their complimentary tickets to attend the annual exhibitions. In addition, he was able to visit the studio of his uncle, William S. Haseltine. His education continued at Princeton University, where in 1876 he earned a degree in science; he remained at the University another year as an assistant professor of physics. Butler spent the summer of 1877 in the Rocky Mountains, serving as assistant photographer on the Princeton Geological Expedition. During this period, he drew and painted in water color in his spare time.
From 1878 to 1881, Butler worked in New York for various telegraph and telephone companies. He became acquainted with Thomas Edison and produced technical illustrations of Edison's inventions. By attending night classes, Butler graduated from the Columbia University Law School in 1881. Until 1884, he practiced electrical patent law as a partner in the firm of Pope, Edgecomb, and Butler. He painted when he could, taking lessons from Bruce Crane. Dissatisfied with his job, he resolved to become a professional artist in 1884.
Equipped with a letter of introduction from the father of a college friend, Butler traveled to Mexico to study with Frederic Church. The ailing painter and his wife took in the twenty-eight-year-old, and he received his first training in oil painting. By the winter of 1884-85, Butler was back in New York, studying at the Art Students League with J. Carroll Beckwith and George de Forest Brush. He moved into the Sherwood Studio Building with William M. J. Rice. Shortly thereafter, he left for Paris, spending two years in several different studios. Among his teachers were Raphael Collin, Alfred Philippe Roll, Henri Gervex, L‚on Bonnat, and P.A.J. Dagnan-Bouveret. Butler traveled extensively, spending one summer in Concarneau with the influential Alexander Harrison. Other American friends included Frederic A. Bridgman and Arthur Hoeber. Returning to New York in 1887, Butler again took a trip to Mexico and settled afterward in the Sherwood Building.
In 1889, Butler founded the American Fine Arts Society and raised the money to erect the Fine Arts Building at 215 West Fifty-seventh Street, a facility shared by the Society of American Artists, the Art Students League, and the Architectural League. It was in the gallery rooms of this building that the Academy presented its exhibitions from 1900 to 1941. He served as president of the Fine Arts Society for seventeen years.
In his efforts to find donors, Butler met Andrew Carnegie who, impressed with his abilities, invited him to become president of the Carnegie Music Hall Company. He accepted, and for ten years, he spent half of the day in his office and half painting in his Carnegie Hall studio. Although Butler successfully saw through the construction of Carnegie's Fifth Avenue mansion (now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum), relations between the two men became strained. Butler resigned in 1905.
During these years, Butler made money through portraiture (he painted at least seventeen likenesses of Carnegie), although he preferred landscape and marine subjects. In 1891, a year after his marriage to Virginia Hays, he bought property in East Hampton, Long Island and began to study the sea intensely. Beginning in 1902, he alternated passing summers between East Hampton and Santa Clara, California.
In 1910, Butler was instrumental in forming the National Academy Association, a loose confederation of a number of New York's artist and architect professional organizations, of which the Academy was principal, dedicated to acquiring or constructing a building to serve as headquarters and exhibition facility for all. As was characteristic, Butler was its president. He was also active in the affairs of the Academy, serving as its vice president from 1915 to 1920 and contributing generously to its endowment with gifts of stocks over the years. The sole award he received for work shown in Academy exhibits was the Carnegie prize in the winter exhibition of 1916; whether conveying that particular prize was an accidental or intentional irony was the jury's secret.
Butler was a staunch conservative, and in 1919 he engaged in a dispute with George Bellows over the Academy jury system in a series of newspaper letters. Even Butler's traditionalist teacher, J. Carroll Beckwith, found him "narrow in his views regarding art."
Butler's mature years saw him renew his interest in science. He painted the solar eclipses of 1918, 1923, 1925, and 1932. In 1923, he published Painter and Space, a treatise on the interrelation of science and art. He also served as a consultant to the American Museum of Natural History's astronomy department. In politics, he lobbied extensively for the adoption of the League of Nations and the World Court. His later years were divided between residences in Princeton, Maine, and California.
