Born in New Hampshire, Shurtleff attended Dartmouth College and became an architect’s assistant in Manchester, NH. He studied at New York’s National Academy of Design and served as a volunteer in the Civil War in 1861. Afterwards, he became a magazine illustrator in New York before settling in Connecticut. He turned to landscape painting in the late 1860s, and first exhibited at the National Academy in 1872. He spent summers in the Adirondacks, at Keene Valley, New York, where he painted forest interiors. He and artist John Lee Fitch were responsible for attracting a group of painters to the Keene Valley region, including Winslow Homer, Alexander Wyant, James David Smillie, and Julian Alden Weir (who build a studio next to Shurtleff).
