William Haseltine was born into a family that produced much artistic talent. His mother, Elizabeth Stanley Shinn Haseltine, was a painter, and both his brothers were active in the art world: James Henry Haseltine was a sculptor, and Charles Field Haseltine owned the Haseltine Art Galleries in Philadelphia. This tradition was carried into the next generation by William's son Herbert, a sculptor and also a National Academician.
William Haseltine first studied art in 1850 and 1851 in Philadelphia, under the German expatriate artist Paul Weber. After attending the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1854, he accompanied Weber to Düsseldorf, where he continued his training under Andreas Achenbach, an artist with whom Weber had studied. In 1856 Haseltine traveled through Germany and the Alps with Albert Bierstadt, Emanuel Leutze, and Worthington Whittredge, eventually arriving in Rome, where he remained for two years. He was back in Philadelphia in 1859 (the year a work of his was first included in an Academy annual exhibition) and 1860 but then settled in New York for a time, taking rooms in the Tenth Street Studio Building. He evidently made a number of sketching trips to the New England coast and in the Delaware River valley, for among his submissions to Academy annuals from 1861 through 1865 were scenes from these areas.
Haseltine and his family spent the late 1860s in France, where he painted in Paris and at Barbizon; he also showed a number of works in the Salon. In the autumn of 1869, the family moved to Rome and eventually found permanent accommodations in the Palazzo Alter, which they established as a social center for American expatriates and tourists in the city. Haseltine took sketching trips throughout Italy, to Sicily, or to Venice every spring and autumn, and often went to Bavaria or the Tyrol in the summer. An inveterate traveler, he visited most of the countries of Europe at one time or another.
Although he was a confirmed expatriate, Haseltine always kept close ties with his native land and returned to America several times during the last three decades of his life. He had a studio in New York for a time in 1873-74; worked in Boston for the winter of 1896; and traveled to the American West and Alaska with his son Herbert in 1899. Haseltine was a member of New York's Century Association and Salmagundi Club, a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, and a member of the Art Committee for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893.
At his death, about fifteen hundred paintings, drawings, and watercolors were in Haseltine's Palazzo Altieri studio; there they remained for twenty years, eventually passing to his daughter Helen Haseltine Plowden. A selection of these works formed a memorial exhibition, which debuted at the Academy in December 1958 and toured nationally. In 1961, wanting the remainder of her father's oeuvre to return to his native land, Mrs. Plowden asked the Academy to assist her in distributing it among American public collections; these included the Dayton (Ohio) Art Institute, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and the Montclair (N.J.) Art Museum.
