Theodore Earl Butler (1861-1936) was an American Impressionist painter whose life and work were deeply intertwined with the artistic community that gathered around Claude Monet at Giverny. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Butler received his early artistic training at the Art Students League in New York before traveling to Paris in the late 1880s to study at the Académie Julian, where so many American painters of his generation completed their education.

In 1888, Butler made the pivotal move to Giverny, the small Normandy village where Monet had established his home and garden and where a small colony of American painters had begun to gather. There Butler became a central figure in the "Giverny Group," a circle of American artists that included Frederick MacMonnies, Theodore Robinson, and John Leslie Breck. He soon became personally close to the Monet household, and in 1892 he married Monet's stepdaughter Suzanne Hoschedé. After Suzanne's untimely death in 1899, Butler married her sister Marthe Hoschedé, and the two continued to raise the children of his first marriage together in the family home at Giverny.

Butler spent most of his adult life at Giverny, painting the village, the surrounding countryside, and the intimate scenes of his own family. His pictures embrace the Impressionist principles absorbed from Monet while developing a distinctive personal voice, and his later work moved into more experimental territory that drew on Post-Impressionist and Nabis influences. For decades his reputation was somewhat overshadowed by his relationship to Monet, but recent scholarship has firmly established Butler as one of the most gifted American Impressionists of his generation, and his paintings are now held in major American museum collections.