Growing up in Okeechobee, in interior Florida, Robert Butler familiarity with the environment that he would teach himself to paint. His paintings were dramatically romanticized landscapes within the Highwaymen’s stylistic parameters. Butler’s oeuvre was different however, and Jim Fitch expressed the reason most succinctly when he commented, “Robert has sold more turkeys than Publix.” His environment was different than that of the other Highwaymen; they lived along the state’s east coast and painted primarily coastal scenes, river ways, royal Poinciana trees, and the Indian River backcountry. Butler made paintings that appealed to the cattle ranchers and citrus growers there, in the state’s interior. His paintings of expansive savannas and glades, pine woods, swamps, cabbage and oak hammocks are distinguished by a more fastidious approach than others in the cohort, and this is likely due to his expressed desire to be “a historian with a brush.” As Fitch says, “Robert Butler owned the Heartland.”