AFA Autumn 2018

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 99 Alfred Hutty (1877–1954), In a Southern City, 1922. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches. Alfred Hutty grew up in Kansas City where he earned a scholarship to the Kansas City School of Fine Arts, training in stained glass design. After marrying Bessie Crafton, Hutty furthered his study at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, where he met Impressionist painter Birge Harrison. Hutty moved his young family to New York to study landscape painting with Harrison at the Woodstock arts colony. He continued to work in stained glass, completing commissions for Tiffany Studios before serving as a ship camouflage artist during World War I. Soon after the end of the war, Hutty headed south, seeking new regions to paint. He found that Charleston provided rich and varied subject matter and scenery as well as a respite from hard Northeastern winters. Impressionism was seldom the vehicle for social critique, but Hutty’s 1922 observation of an African-American nanny strolling with a white toddler under the sheltering portico of Charleston’s St. Michael’s Episcopal Church is a subtle and poignant symbol of the complexities of race relations in the Jim Crow-era South.