Gertrude Eleanor Spurr Cutts was a landscape painter educated in her native England, as well as at the Art Students League summer program in Woodstock, New York. In her thirties, she emigrated to Toronto, Canada, and became active in the local art scene. In 1909 she married William Cutts, also a painter, and together they traveled abroad and along the East Coast of the United States.
Gertrude Cutts was born in Scarborough, in Yorkshire, England, and attended the Scarborough School of Art. In addition to private art lessons, she would go on to further her education at the Lambeth School of Art in London. Then in 1886, she exhibited with the Royal Society of British Artists where James Whistler was president. She also went on sketching trips to Belgium and Holland. In 1890 she settled in Toronto and three years later her work was included at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, where William de Leftwich Dodge painted the dome of the fair’s administration building.
In Toronto, Cutts served as the corresponding secretary of the newly established Toronto Art Students’ League, which had opened its doors to female students that very same year. Its curriculum was somewhat traditional with an emphasis on plein-air painting and drawing from the antique. Members went on sketching trips to Quebec, southern Ontario, England, and Wales. She attended the summer session of the New York-based Art Students League where the emphasis was on landscape painting. Birge Harrison had established the program in 1906.
Following her marriage, Cutts spent three years (1909 to 1912) in St. Ives, Cornwall, attractive to landscape painters because of the quality of its light. Picturesque scenery inspired her throughout a long career working in both watercolors and small oils, the latter of which she likely did en plein air.