David Chapel Hutchison was born August 19, 1869 in Arbroath, Scotland. His father, David Hutchison, was born in Scotland. His mother, Christina Hutchison, was born in Scotland.
He studied at the Edinburgh College of Art in Edinburgh, Scotland.
In 1890 he moved to the city of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada.
On December 31, 1895 he married Mary Elizabeth Jacques in Parry Sound, Ontario, Canada. She was born 1877 in Jervis, Ontario, Canada. Her father was Anthony Jacques and her mother was Agnes Jacques.
On June 8, 1900 his daughter Eva V. Hutchison, was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
In October of 1901 he moved with his wife and daughter to the United States and settled in New York City. They lived at 231 East 74th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
His illustrations were published in Pearson's Magazine, Appleton's, Success, Harper's Monthly, Putnam's Monthly, and Metropolitan Magazine.
In 1910 he applied for U.S. citizenship. The application recorded his physical appearance to be forty-years-old, five-ten, 160 pounds, with dark brown eyes and brown hair. His request for citizenship was endorsed by George "Elbows" McFadden (1873-1951), a famous championship boxing contender, who retired from professional bouts two years earlier and then opened a private gymnasium at 193 East 100th Street, where he taught physical culture to a prosperous clientele.
In 1912 McFadden and Hutchison composed and illustrated instructional book on the fundamentals of boxing.
Although their names were similar and they both promoted the popular trend of Physical Culture, there is no family or business connection whatsoever between George McFadden, who taught Physical Culture at his private gym in NYC, and Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955), the eccentric publisher of Physical Culture Magazine, which was published in NYC since the turn of the century.
During the 1910s David C. Hutchison published illustrations in The Popular, Metropolitan Magazine, People's Ideal Fiction, The Saturday Evening Post, Nash's Magazine, Colliers, and Harper's Weekly.
In 1916 David C. Hutchison and his family moved to 174 Hawthorne Avenue in Yonkers, NY. This suburban town is north of the Bronx, but only a short commute to mid-town Manhattan by Metro North trains to Grand Central Station.
In 1917 the artist did not serve in the military during the Great War, at which time he was forty-nine-years-old and supported a wife and child.
In June of 1918 his daughter graduated from Yonkers High School. That fall she began to attend Barnard College on 116th Street and Broadway, beside Columbia University on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in Harlem.
His marriage ended in divorce. He moved to nearby 145 Hawthorne Avenue in Yonkers.
By 1920 his wife and daughter had moved to 551 West 170th Street in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan. His daughter continued to attend Barnard College, where she graduated in the Class of '22.
During the 1920s his illustrations were published in The Popular, Everybody's Magazine, Action Stories, North-West Stories, and Outdoor Stories.
On June 21, 1924 his daughter Eva V. Hutchison married Robert F. Dirkes, a 1920 graduate of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, which was accessible at the time by a short ferry boat ride across the Hudson River from a busy Ferry Terminal on West 14th Street.
Robert F. Dirkes was an engineer with the Western Union Telegraph Company in NYC. He developed 35 patents for essential telegraph equipment and was in direct charge of the installation of high-speed tickers on the New York Stock Exchange, as well as the first nationwide network of ticker tape machines.
On August 1, 1925 David C. Hutchison and his friend Sydney Riesenberg were judges in The Miss Yonkers 1925 Beauty Pageant. The artists chose Miss Wilma Engle, a chorus girl from the famous Ziegfeld Follies.
Hutchison and Riesenberg were leading members of The Yonkers Art Association. Their landscape paintings were included in most annual exhibitions.
During the 1930s David C. Hutchison's illustrations were published in Argosy, War Novels, Boy's Life and Liberty Magazine.
During the Great Depression he earned thirty-four dollars a week painting a series of murals for the Children's Room at the Yonkers Public Library at 87 South Broadway. His murals included three lunettes that depicted scenes of local history and inspiring historic figures, including Ivanhoe, Henry Hudson and Thomas Edison. When public funding for the project ran out after one year the artist continued to work without compensation to complete the murals. The installation was opened the public on November 25, 1935.
After WWII he moved to Brookfield, Connecticut, to live near his daughter's family in a rugged tract of wilderness overlooking a tiny lake surrounded by rocky knolls and deep woods.
David C. Hutchison died at the age of eighty-four in Brookfield, CT, on June 12, 1954.
© David Saunders 2013 |
