William Starbuck Macy
William Starbuck Macy was born into the old Nantucket Quaker families of Starbuck and Macy. His father, William H. Macy, was part of the family that had come to New Bedford following the whaling trade. Here he married Eliza J. Wordell on May 1, 1851, and young William was born on September 11, 1853.
Macy developed an interest in art and traveled to pursue his education. He studied in New York at the National Academy of Design in company with William Chase and Frank Duveneck. By 1873, he had left New York to work in Munich, Germany, where for four years he was a student of a Russian painter named Velton. He earned his living at the time by acting as an agent for a New York and London picture dealer. His commission was 10 per cent of all paintings sent to the dealer, and his position was lucrative in the winter, when all the other foreign dealers had left the European art market.
In the late 1870s, Macy returned to the United States. The publisher Harry Harper gave him the assignment of touring the Dakotas in the company of the author Henry Van Dyke. Macy sketched the countryside made famous by the Sitting Bull massacre, while Van Dyke gathered material for a book on the subject.
Macy first listed himself in the New Bedford City Directory in 1879. Apparently he kept studios in both New York and New Bedford for at least eight years. During this time, he also shared the same address in New York at 52 East 23rd Street with the artist William Sartain in 1881.
In the “New Bedford Art Club Scrapbook” an article described him as a truthful painter of local scenery. “He was alike at home in the delineation of local scenes or amid the warmer tones on tropical climes.”
The “tropical climes” attracted him for health reasons in 1890, and he moved to California. Here in 1894, he married Anne Alexander of Santa Barbara. Except for a brief period of time in Orange, New Jersey, Macy remained on the west coast for the rest of his life.