Biography:

The facts regarding the life of Walworth Stilson are limited to a history of the Stilson family, census reports of New Milford, Connecticut, and a few details from a letter regarding prints by Stilson donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Stilson’s father, William Bostwick Stilson, was born in New Milford, Connecticut on September 30, 1842, and worked as a civil engineer. His mother, Ida Cynthia Alford, was born in Oswego, New York on June 25, 1851. The two were married August 4, 1869. The couple resided in New Milford, where a son, Jay Alvord, was born April 24, 1870, a daughter Mabel Louise was born March 11, 1872, and William Walworth was born July 29, 1874. The family moved to Jackson, Michigan circa 1882, where the father worked for the Michigan Central railroad at Detroit as a principal assistant engineer. A fourth child, Charles Edward, was born September 11, 1884 in Detroit, MI.

Walworth Stilson received a scholarship to the Detroit School of Arts, which he attended from 1892 to 1894. He also worked as an illustrator in Detroit until 1896, when moved back to New Milford, Connecticut, to continue his career as an artist and botanical illustrator. In 1901, the Frederick A. Stokes Company of New York published Our Ferns in their Haunts, for which Stilson completed 194 illustrations in pen & ink and graphite renderings. In the book, Willard M. Clute, a noted American botanist, surveyed the known species of ferns in America.

In 1909, twenty-nine original graphite drawings by Stilson were used to illustrate a one-hundredth anniversary edition of the William Cullen Bryant poem, Thanatopsis. In their prospectus announcing the release of this book, the Tandy-Thomas Company of New York proclaimed, ”Mr. Stilson, the artist, has spent many years studying Nature in all her visible forms, until the same inspiration which prompted the writing of the words compelled him to express their meaning in these beautiful works of art.” Stilson was later commissioned to complete 10 woodcuts for use as illustrations in The Writers of Knickerbocker New York. This 1912 publication by the Grolier Club of New York, the nation’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles, was limited to an edition of 300 copies.

No other factual information regarding Stilson’s work after 1912 has been located, short of a notation regarding a studio fire sometime before 1925 and his death in 1962. What can be taken from these works is Stilson’s remarkable ability to capture the essence of the Nature he observed, in both meticulous rendering and carefully crafted, reflective verse.