Aaron Draper Shattuck is celebrated today for his intimate, precisely rendered pastoral landscapes in the Hudson River School style. Shattuck debuted as a landscape artist in 1855, the same year that Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) published his first series of “Letters on Landscape Painting” in the commencement issue of The Crayon. Durand encouraged artists to paint directly from nature and with scrupulous fidelity, and his letters provide significant insight into the methods of purposes of mid-nineteenth century landscape art and the spirit of the time in which Shattuck flourished.

Unlike many American artists of any generation, he felt little professional obligation to study in Europe. Born in New Hampshire, he studied in Boston and New York City, and spent his summers sketching and gathering inspiration within the borders of New England and New York. His fidelity to nature and sensitivity to its conditions and colors earned him praise from the first time he exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1855. He was elected a full member six years later.

Shattuck purchased a twenty-eight acre farmstead for his family in Granby, Connecticut in 1870. He remained there until his death in 1928. He ceased painting altogether in 1888, and in the last decades of his life he enjoyed his time in the roles of animal breeder, horticulturalist, craftsman, and inventor.