Seymour Guy was orphaned at age nine and raised by guardians who disapproved of his wish to become an artist. Nonetheless, he managed, when he was fifteen, to receive some instruction from a marine painter named Buttersworth. Perhaps this was Thomas Buttersworth, but more likely it was James Buttersworth, who immigrated to America in the late 1840s. After the death of his guardians, he was able to pursue art studies in London, initially by visits to the British Museum and then, starting in 1847, through apprenticeship to Ambrosini Jerôme, a portraitist whose chief distinction was that she enjoyed the patronage of the Duchess of Kent. Guy's only recorded professional recognition while living in England came in 1851, when his Cupid in Search of Psyche (George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, Springfield, Mass.) was exhibited at the British Institution. This mythological subject was probably a rare departure from the portraits that comprised Guy's standard fare at the time.
According to George W. Sheldon, whose information evidently came from the artist, Guy arrived in America in 1854 and was at first occupied solely with portraits. Several of these, dating from 1857 and 1858, are known. When he made his American exhibition debut in the Academy's 1859 annual, it was with four portraits and one subject picture. Although Guy was noted for his painstaking technique and slow production, it is difficult to believe that he had been in the United States as long as five years before participating in a public exhibition.
For that 1859 show, Guy gave a Brooklyn address. That same year he was part of a group of Brooklyn artists who founded the Brooklyn Art Social, an enterprise aimed at getting patrons to view and purchase paintings in a convivial setting. The art socials were so successful that, in January 1861, the organization recast itself as the more formal Brooklyn Art Association, with Guy again among the founders. In 1866 tensions between the association's artist and lay members led to the formation of the Brooklyn Academy of Design, whose membership-like that of the National Academy-was restricted to professional artists; Guy also was a founding member of this group. Although he was not among the founders of the American Society of Painters in Water Color, Guy was on its membership roster by the time it held its first exhibition in November 1867.
From 1863 until at least 1908 Guy maintained his studio in New York's Tenth Street Studio Building, where living quarters were part of the arrangement. Yet, given the fact that Guy contributed consistently to the exhibitions of the Brooklyn Art Social and then the Brooklyn Art Association from 1859 through 1887, and that he had a wife and family, it seems likely that his residence was in Brooklyn.
By the mid-1860s Guy had turned his primary attention to the genre subjects for which he was principally regarded, although he continued to execute portraits for the rest of his career. His choice of subject focused narrowly on very young children in commonplace domestic situations; occasionally he included the mothers of these children in the scene. Whatever the course of study Guy pursued in England, he was an exceptionally well-trained painter. His compositions were noted for their mathematical precision and their high finish; slow, careful, and conscientious were adjectives admiringly used to describe his methods. Dramatic chiaroscuro effects were a particular specialty. Although his works are now often dismissed as saccharine, in his own day they were thought notable for avoiding meretricious sentimentality. Generally, Guy worked in a diminutive scale appropriate to his subjects. The painting that garnered him the most critical attention, however, was his five-by-six-foot group portrait of thirteen members of the William H. Vanderbilt family, depicted in the family library as they prepared to leave for the opera (1874, Biltmore, Asheville, N.C.).
Throughout his long career, Guy apparently never wavered from the style and choice of subject matter with which he established his reputation in the late 1850s and 1860s. It is therefore not surprising that the press ceased to notice him several decades before the century ended. Nonetheless, he remained a near-constant contributor to Academy exhibitions through 1908 and, clearly, was highly regarded by the membership, which elected him to service on the Council for the years 1869-73, 1875-76, 1881-84, and 1887-90.
