Pasture
to Pond: Connecticut Impressionism at the Bruce Museum in
Greenwich, CT, runs through June 22, brings
American Impressionism back to its roots, according to the Museum’s Executive
Director, Peter C. Sutton.
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| Davis_Uplands | Charles H. Davis, (American, 1856-1933) | Summer Uplands, n.d. |
Drawn from the permanent collection of
the Bruce, private collectors, area museums, and the trade, this exhibition of
more than 25 works of American Impressionism speaks to the quality and beauty
of this perennially popular art, and to Connecticut’s important role in its
creation.
Before the turn of the 20th
century, Connecticut was a logical birthplace for American Impressionism, as
artists sought a nearby, rural respite from the burgeoning urban and rapidly
industrializing world. While their artistic predecessors, the landscape
painters of the Hudson River School, had championed dramatic landscapes of panoramic
sweep and awe-inspiring majesty, the artists who came of age after the calamity
and chaos of the Civil War sought a more intimate, bucolic and orderly
landscape. They found these reassuring
views among the farms, rolling hills, rivers and picturesque shoreline of
Connecticut.
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| Metcalf_Autumn | Willard Leroy Metcalf, (American, 1858-1925) |
While steeped in pre-Revolutionary
history, Connecticut was readily accessible by train to these escaping
urbanites, many of whom had winter studios in New York City. Artists’ colonies sprang up in Cos Cob and
Old Lyme and landscapists took to recording favored sites in places like
Branchville, Farmington, Mystic and the Litchfield Hills. The names of these artists – John H.
Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, and Willard Metcalf – are among the
most famous landscapists in American art history. While some, like Robinson, made regular
pilgrimages to France to paint alongside the great French Impressionist Claude
Monet, others learned the style second hand, and collectively they made it a
uniquely American manner.
“Several of the artists featured in the
show exhibited in the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913, which is
generally regarded as the watershed moment that introduced Modern Art and the
likes of Marcel Duchamp to America,” says Peter Sutton. “It is with pleasure then that we remember
with this exhibition an era of enduring local creativity and the celebration of
the beauty of our own special corner of New England.”
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| Crane_Harvest Moon | Bruce Crane, (American, 1857-1937) |
Pasture
to Pond: Connecticut Impressionism is generously underwritten by People’s
United Bank, a Committee of Honor co-chaired by Leora Levy and Alice Melly, a
grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, and The Charles M. and Deborah
G. Royce Exhibition Fund.
