Donald Sutphin was born in Boston in 1926 and spent his childhood in Hartford, Connecticut. He began his pursuit of art in grade school, then drawing whenever he could through his high school years at a military school. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943 at 17 and served in the Mediterranean Fleet. Upon his return from the service he completed high school, was married, and began a family.
Sutphin attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1948-51 with a concentration in printmaking. The focus of instruction at the Museum School under the direction of Karl Zerbe, a German-born painter, was centered upon a program that stressed both disciplines of technique with rigorous study from the figure, and individual expression and drawing from the imagination. The examples of European Modernist art, German Expressionist printmakers such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, and Boston Expressionist painters Hyman Bloom and David Aronson helped to inform a personal style that Sutphin built upon throughout his life. He taught drawing and painting at the Kingswood School in West Hartford, Connecticut, and became the art director at Scarborough School, Scarborough, New York, 1952-1953. In 1954 he went on to the Art Students League in New York City to study with George Grosz.
Sutphin’s time in the military had exposed him to the Mediterranean regions of Europe, for which he had developed an affinity, and in 1955 at the urgings of artists he had met at the Art Students League, he moved to Florence, Italy. Sutphin established his studio and began to exhibit his drawings, paintings, and prints in galleries in Italy and then widely throughout the United States and Europe. In 1964 The Archives of American Art created the “Donald Sutphin papers, 1956-1964“, a record of his catalogs, drawings, prints, and related materials as part of their collecting project in Rome. Sutphin was recognized as a member of the community of artists in Florence, a teacher and mentor to younger artists. As an American expatriate artist, Sutphin has written that “Life in Florence has given me time to think out and feel what I am.”. Sutphin lived in Florence until he died in 2015.