William Cutts was largely a self‒taught painter, born of British parents in Allahabad, India. He moved to England and studied painting for a short period. Here he was greatly influenced by European artistic techniques, copying the Old Masters and their traditional painting conventions. In 1870 Cutts emigrated to Canada, residing in Stratford, Ontario with his mother and stepfather before settling in Toronto. Portraiture was a highly popular painting form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from staged commissions to leisure portraits. Cutts took various portrait commissions and continued to grow as a professional painter in Canadian artistic circles. He would soon join the newly founded Royal Canadian Academy and the Ontario Society of Artists‒marked, signs of his development as an important player in the emerging circle of professional Canadian artists.
