Mildred Anne Butler - Career

Career

Her father Henry may have encouraged her to paint in her youth but her artistic training began in London in the late 1880s with the English watercolourist Paul Jacob Naftel, whom she credited for her understanding of watercolours. Butler like her friend Rose Barton, who also studied under Naftel, did not follow his choice of landscape, instead she devoted herself to cattle, birds, and flower gardens. She continued her studies at Westminster School of Art under William Frank Calderon who specialised in animal painting and later opened a school of animal painting. At Frank Calderon's School she studied the subject of cows, and it was that work for which she was elected to the Old Society, the Royal Academy.

In her late twentieths she made annual visits to the continent until the outbreak of war. She travelled to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. In Paris, she studied studied drawing, figure drawing and fine art painting. While in Paris she became associated with the Newlyn school and went on to spend the summers of 1894 and 1895 in Newlyn in Cornwall. Newlyn at that time was the centre for a group of artists who were interested in plein-air subjects, many of whom had previously studied in France. She was attached to the Newlyn School, and Norman Garstin's studio in particular alongside contemporaries such as Walter Osborne and Sir John Lavery. Garstin like Osborne had been a pupil of the Antwerp master Charles Verlat. Butler established a friendship with Luke Fildes, Stanhope Forbes and whom she met at Newlyn. The influence of the Limerick-born Garstin, and Forbes, and the contact with the Newlyn School informed Butler's development and remained an important influence on her work throughout her life.

Butler continuously exhibited there throughout her career and proved herself to be a keen business woman capable of marketing her watercolours successfully with patrons such as Queen Mary of Teck and Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. At Frank Calderon's School she studied the subject of cows, and it was that work for which she was elected to the Old Society, the Royal Academy, which she became a member of the Royal Academy in 1893. She was one of the first nine academicians elected by the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1930. She was granted full membership into the Royal Watercolour Society in 1937, having been an associate member since 1896.