Clifford Warren Ashley (American, 1881 to 1947)
Clifford Warren Ashley was an author and painter, born in the whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1881. He attended the Eric Pape School of Art and continued his studies with landscape painter George Loftus Noyes. By around 1901, Ashley moved to Wilmington, Delaware to work with preeminent illustrator Howard Pyle and join the Brandywine school of artists. There, Ashley first began to enjoy success as an artist and in 1904 he was commissioned by Harper’s Monthly Magazine to write and illustrate an article about whaling, which would be called “The Blubber Hunters.”
By 1913 Ashley turned his attention to painting and spent the following years painting the islands in Buzzards Bay, the waterfront of New Bedford, and various locations on Cape Cod including Provincetown. He continued to spend the winter months in Wilmington yet returned to his native Massachusetts for the summers. He married Sarah Scudder Clarke in 1932 and the couple settled in Westport, Massachusetts.
Information courtesy of Skinner Inc., November, 2008.