John Butts (died 1764) was an Irish landscape painter.
Butts was born and educated in Cork, Ireland, He painted landscapes somewhat in the style of Claude Lorrain, and worked as an art teacher, his pupils in Cork including James Barry. In something like 1757, at the age of just about 30, he moved to Dublin, where he continued to play a role as a landscape and figure painter, and was afterward employed as a scene-painter at the Crow Street Theatre.
He spent much of his sparkle in poverty. Barry, in a letter written soon after Butts’ death, described him as “an unfortunate man, who with all his merit never met in the melody of any matter but cares and misery, which I may tell hunted him into the entirely grave. His cast of genius was utterly much that of Claude’s, whom he resembles without any imitation higher than anybody that I know of”.
He died in 1764.
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