“Finding Religion: American Art from the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection,” a new exhibition on view January 14 through May 28 at the Florence Griswold Museum, explores how the ideas of religion and spirituality were manifested and conveyed in American art between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Using 40 works drawn entirely from the museum’s Hartford Steam Boiler collection, “Finding Religion” examines the various paths artists such as Ralph Earl, Frederic Church, Fidelia Bridges and John Twachtman have taken in their quest to find religion in the world around them.

From sweeping and majestic images of the natural world to highly personal images of family and home, this exhibition explores the many expressions of faith and spirituality in art and considers their roles in shaping American culture. “The breadth of the Hartford Steam Boiler collection presents the opportunity to consider the significant transitions of national self-definition through a series of new lenses,” noted Dr Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, a leading scholar in the fields of art, religious and cultural studies at Georgetown University. “The exhibition challenges us to look at these works from the perception of, and in response to, a variety of religious and spiritual expressions.”

Organized by Dr Emily Weeks Florentino, the museum’s former curator of American art, “Finding Religion: American Art from the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection” is divided into several themes, with historical evidence and scholarly observations used to interpret each section. Often, the relationship between art and religion can be simple and transparent, as viewed in The Good Word section of the exhibition. Here, the paintings are all portraits dating from 1793 to 1890. Visual clues, often a Bible or other devotional text, allude to the sitter’s steadfast spiritual resolve. The striking and highly stylized features in Ammi Phillips’ “Portrait of Katherine Salisbury Newkirk Hickok,” circa 1825, reference aspects of Puritanism found in that era.

Whenever organized religion has seemed too limiting, Americans have often turned to the natural world for inspiration. In the Nineteenth Century, popular philosophical movements held that nature was “God’s other book,” a sacred text of truly awesome proportions. The section Landscapes of Belief uses the art of Frederic Church, Thomas Cole and others to explain these values. Taking the observation of, and devotion to, nature one step further, artists influenced by the British art critic and philosopher John Ruskin (1813-1900) believed that the informed observance of nature was nothing less than “following the finger of God.” In his view, art, religion and nature were inextricably intertwined. John F. Kensett’s “Study of a Burdoch Plant” and Fidelia Bridges’ “Thistle in a Field,” 1875, exemplify this philosophy.

Also in the 1800s, many Christian denominations began redefining religion as a matter of the heart rather than the mind. Paintings from the section titled Morality, Domesticity and the Modern Madonna, such as John Henry Twachtman’s “Barnyard,” circa 1890-1900, and George de Forest Brush’s “In the Garden,” 1923, are rich with images of women and children and illustrate the parallel that was drawn between the American mother and child and the Madonna and Child.

In the early Nineteenth Century, America’s wilderness spoke of divine promise, but it was the city that mattered at the century’s end. The paintings selected to represent the theme Civil Religion: History, Nationalism and the Idea of America, such as Guy Wiggins’ patriotic “Washington’s Birthday at Madison Square,” 1927, suggest that the booming metropolitan environment of America, although fraught with problems, unified individual citizens, and, like a church, offered a public space in which citizens could join together for a spirited observation of national unity. The gradual shift in America’s religious focus – from reading the Bible to “reading” a monument, and from practicing pious acts to revering patriotic icons – has led many to see modern America as secular.

The Florence Griswold Museum is at 96 Lyme Street. For information, 860-434-5542 or www.florencegriswoldmuseum.org.