The Florence Griswold Museum presents a new exhibition titled “The Artistic Heritage of Connecticut: Highlights from the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection,” currently on view through April 20.
Connecticut has long been a center for the visual arts in America. Even before the Revolutionary War, artists captured the likenesses of the colony’s prosperous inhabitants. After independence, painters depicted the state’s proud citizens and employed their brushes to celebrate the new republic through its landscape.
While the state’s artistic heritage has, in many ways, paralleled the larger story of American art, its artists have responded specifically to Connecticut’s independent spirit, embodied in the “Connecticut Yankee” and to the character of its landscape. In doing so, they helped to shape an identity for New England that lingers in the American mind. The exhibition is sponsored by The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company.
Curator Amy Kurtz Lansing chose more than 40 works from the Hartford Steam Boiler collection, which was donated to the museum by the company in 2001, to tell the story of Connecticut’s role in American art history. Some are old favorites, like Ammi Phillip’s “Portrait of Katherine Salisbury Newkirk Hickok,” circa 1825, and Frederic E. Church’s “The Charter Oak at Hartford,” circa 1846. These works illustrate the value that provincial art patrons placed on unembellished depictions of themselves as well as Americans’ growing pride in the young nation’s history.
Some works, such as “View on the River, Farmington,” 1866, by Marie Theresa Gorsuch Hart and “East Rock, New Haven,” 1862, by George H. Durrie, suggest that even as industrialization progressed during the mid-Nineteenth century, many landscape painters still envisioned Connecticut as a pastoral paradise, helping to cement the image of southern New England as old-fashioned and rural.
Connecticut’s proximity to two major centers of American art, New York City and Boston, made it a popular place for artists to visit. Works by Childe Hassam and John H. Twachtman, depicting Connecticut’s farms and towns under varying qualities of light, demonstrate the state’s draw. “Not only was there a vibrant art scene in the coastal colonies of Old Lyme and Cos Cob but in Hartford as well, where the modern painter Milton Avery began his career,” said Kurtz Lansing.
In addition to these highlights, the exhibition includes several recent acquisitions that complement the holdings of the Hartford Steam Boiler collection. Paintings by two Hartford artists, genre specialist Richard Law Hinsdale and landscape artist Charles DeWolf Brownell, further enrich the story of Connecticut’s artistic heritage. Brownell’s watercolors come from a visual diary he kept to record his observations. A protégé of Church, Brownell shared his mentor’s interest in nature and travel. “Joshua’s Seat” demonstrates his fascination with both local landmarks and the texture of the rocky outcropping on the Connecticut River in Lyme, which he sketched in August 1858.
The Florence Griswold Museum is at 96 Lyme Street. For general information, www.FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org or 860-434-5542.
