William Stanley Haseltine was an American painter and draftsman who was associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting, the Hudson River School and Luminism.
Born in Philadelphia to John Haseltine, a successful businessman, and Elizabeth Shinn Haseltine, an amateur landscape painter, Haseltine studied at the University of Pennsylvania and then at Harvard University, where he received a degree in 1854.
He first exhibited his paintings the following year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, after which he sailed to Europe, first joining a colony of American painters who were studying in Düsseldorf, then traveling up the Rhine into Switzerland and Italy. In late 1857 he settled in Rome, and in the following months made numerous excursions to draw the landscape around Rome and on Capri.
In 1858 Haseltine returned to Philadelphia, and by late 1859 was installed in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, then a central point for American landscape painter.
Though many of his paintings from this time derived from his European sketches, Haseltine also began to paint the oceanside of New England, especially favoring the rockbound coasts of Narragansett, Rhode Island, Nahant, Massachusetts, and Mount Desert Island, Maine. The precision with which he painted these landscapes won critical praise, and Haseltine was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1860, and a full Academician in 1861.