Clifford Warren Ashley

Clifford Ashley was born in New Bedford, MA, and was graduated from New Bedford High School in 1900. After high school he enrolled in the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston and in 1901 he continued his studies under the landscape painter George L. Noyes. He next joined Howard Pyle's "Brandywine" school in Wilmington, Delaware.

In 1904 Harper's Monthly Magazine gave him a commission to do an article on whaling with narrative and pictures. Ashley sailed aboard the bark Sunbeam to observe a whaling voyage first hand. This voyage supplied the background for his article titled "The Blubber Hunters," which ran in two issues of Harper's in 1906. These articles became the first two chapters in his subsequent book, The Yankee Whaler.

Ashley continued to work in painting and illustration and divided his time between Willmington and New Bedford. In 1913 he decided to focus on painting and he spent the next few years recording the islands of Buzzards Bay, scenes of Cape Cod, and the waterfront of New Bedford. During the First World War, Ashley resumed his pattern of spending the winters in Wilmington and summers in New Bedford

In 1932 he married Sarah Scudder Clarke and moved to a restored and renovated farmhouse in Westport, MA. In 1944 he published The Ashley Book of Knots which contained descriptions and drawings of 3,854 knots. This book has received such acclaim that it is still in print. One year after its publication he suffered a crippling stroke; and he died two years later at the age of sixty-five