Although Eliot Clark studied briefly under John H. Twatchman at the Art Students League in New York in 1897, his artistic education came chiefly from his father, the landscape painter Walter Clark. By 1900 Clark was in Gloucester with his father, painting with Frank Duveneck, Edward Potthast, Twachtman, and others. The following year the young artist accompanied his father on a trip from Buffalo through the Northern Plains states to British Columbia. He then traveled extensively in Europe for two years, beginning in 1904, visiting France, England, France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, and the Low Countries.
Upon returning to the United States, Clark settled in New York, at the Van Dyck Studios, where he remained essentially until 1922, though he visited the America West in 1912 and 1913, was in Nova Scotia in 1917, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the following year. In 1912, when he was not yet thirty, his work won a Julius Hallgarten Prize, the only award he ever received in an Academy annual exhibition.
In 1919 Clark began teaching at the Art Students League, staying until 1922, when he moved to Kent, Connecticut. There he lived for the next decade-again not without wide-ranging excursions; for example, he was in Morocco and Italy in 1930. In 1923 he helped found the Kent Art Association. In 1932 he moved to Albemarle County, Virginia, but continued to travel widely, painting in Arizona, California, Mexico, and India in the 1930s. From 1940 until his retirement to Albemarle County in 1959, Clark maintained a studio in New York.
His tonalist landscape paintings appeared in group and solo shows throughout the country, and enjoyed a wide patronage. He was especially proud that, as early as 1915, President Woodrow Wilson acquired one of his works.
Clark was dedicated to service in the arts, both as a member of many arts organizations and as a writer of numerous articles and biographies on American artists. He was president of the American Watercolor Society from 1919 to 1923 and of the Allied Artists of America from 1948 to 1952. But it was the National Academy to which he was, perhaps, most dedicated. He first served on the Council in 1946-47. In 1948 he was elected corresponding secretary, a post to which he was annually returned through 1955, when he was elected a vice-president. The following year he became president of the Academy, serving for three years. During these years he wrote the definitive history of the Academy, published by Columbia University Press in 1954, and was the guiding force behind a comprehensive review and registration of the collections. Nor did his attentions to preservation of the Academy's heritage cease with his retirement to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1959: during the early 1960s Clark undertook, on his own, the mounting and physical stabilization of hundreds of canvases in the Academy's collection that were in imminent danger of irreparable decay.
