Hutson was born in South Carolina, learned to read at age four and spent much of his youth in his father's library. During the Civil War, he fought for the Confederacy where he was injured and captured. After his release and the war's end, he returned home, studied law and became a lawyer. After deciding that economic conditions in the post-war South were not favorable for a career as a lawyer, he returned to school where he studied German, French, Italian and Spanish, later teaching Greek and Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at what later became LSU. He retired from "amateur" teaching at age 68 and began sketching and making plein air landscapes.
Though his daughter was a trained artist, Hutson always preferred to maintain his status of "amateur" and shunned her technical instructions and suggestions. Most of his subject were drawn or painted by memory and generally on cardboard left over from writing tablets from his unpublished poems, novels and short stories. His works were first shown publically in 1917 at the Society of Independent Artists in New York. He is one of thirty self-taught artists included in dealer and scholar Sidney Janis' 1942 book, "They Taught Themselves"