Roswell Morse Shurtleff was born on June 14, 1838 at Rindge, New Hampshire. He was the fourth and youngest child of Asahel Dewey and Eliza (Morse) Shurtleff. He was a descendant of William Shurtleff, who was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, and was in Plymouth, Massachussets, in 1634.
He went to Dartmouth College with the class of 1857 but did not graduate.
He took charge of an architect's office in Manchester, New Hampshire, 1857; worked in a lithographer's shop in Buffalo, New York, 1858-59; went to Boston in 1859 and made drawings on wood for John Andrew, the engraver, in the meantime studying drawing in the evening classes of the Lowell Institute; and in 1860-61 was in New York, where he attended the school of the National Academy of Design and made magazine illustrations.
Upon the opening of the Civil War he enlisted, as a private; in a short time he was promoted to a lieutenancy, and later he became adjutant. On July 19, 1861, he was wounded and captured.
After nearly eight months in Southern hospitals and prisons, he was finally released on parole. He returned to New York, and busied himself with drawing illustrations for magazines and books.
From 1869 to 1875 he had a studio in Hartford. It was in 1870 that he began to paint in oils and in 1872 that he first exhibited at the National Academy. At first he specialized in such pictures of animal life as "The American Panther" (1876), "A Race for Life" (1877), "The Still Hunter, " and "On the Alert" (1879), and "The Wolf at the Door, " all of which were shown at the Academy in the seventies. "The Race for Life, " which depicted a pack of wolves dashing through the winter woods in pursuit of some unseen prey, was considered by contemporaries (New York Tribune, Apr. 28, 1877) a most remarkable picture.
About 1880 Shurtleff turned to landscapes, and he won his greatest success through his paintings of the northern woods and forests. He usually went to the Adirondacks in the summer and autumn, and had a cottage and studio at Keene Valley, where he produced many excellent forest interiors that showed both thorough knowledge and fine feeling.
He became an Academician in 1890. He died in New York, survived by his wife.
Characteristic examples of his work have been hung in several public museums. In the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, is "The First Snow. " The Metropolitan Museum, New York, owns "A Mountain Stream, " in which a brook flows between banks crowded by trees. The Museum of Springfield, Massachussets, also has a good landscape. Shurtleff regularly exhibited his wood interiors at the Academy for many years and was successful in finding a market for them.
On June 14, 1867, he married Clara Eugenia Halliday, daughter of Joseph B. and Eleanor C. Halliday, of Hartford, Connecticut. There were no children.
