Theodore Earl Butler, was an American impressionist painter. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to Paris to study art. He befriended Claude Monet in Giverny, and married his stepdaughter, Suzanne Hoschedé. After her death he married her sister, Marthe Hoschedé. Butler was a founding member of the Society of Independent Artists.
Butler’s chosen subjects were domestic scenes of family and friends and the French landscape. Although his Impressionistic approach to painting sometimes reflected the influence of his father-in-law, his work also suggests Post-Impressionist tendencies as well.
From the time of his first marriage and after the birth of his children, Butler concentrated especially on domestic subjects, painted indoors or in his garden. Monet’s influence on American expatriate painters in Giverny was important, and a similarity between Butler’s palette and that of Monet has been noted in the paintings of the 1890s. Equally noticeable in Butler’s brushwork are qualities that align him with the work of Paul Gauguin and the Nabis artists. In his later work Butler experimented further with Fauve principles, painting landscapes in Giverny and on the Normandy coast, sometimes applying color directly from the tube to decorative ends.