Shore Birds I
Water. Something we think about more and more as torrential rains and rising sea levels portend an uncertain future.the sea has always been a challenge. For centuries it was both a barrier and a beacon, linking yet separating the Old World and the New. For land-bound Europeans, it was to become a gateway to territorial expansion and the promise of prosperous enterprise. As the Atlantic colonies developed, the sea served as a defining element, influencing how life was lived. It offered economic well-being through trade. It also enabled speedy coastal transportation in the absence of roads and provided a life sustaining source of food. Successful merchants, among the first to be portrayed by the tiny contingent of professional
and self-trained New World artists, were regularly shown with a glimpse of ships or ports in the background. By contrast, the hinterland at the colonies’ back initially suggested danger. It was the howling wilderness threatening and, to some degree, impenetrable.
That would change as settlement pressure and agricultural bounty became compelling factors. But the concept and love of the landscape itself emerged only gradually. And by that time, the sea had taken on a different meaning.the world of merchants and mariners began to be displaced as industrialization took hold. And out of that a new romance with the sea was born.the awesome power of the sea and stalwart courage in its confrontation became a compelling image for artists and writers.the sea, in its magnificent and tempestuous moods would not, however, become a serious subject for American painters until late in the 19th century, most notably in the work of Winslow Homer. And, on the rare occasions that mid-century painters turned a poetic eye toward the ocean, it was frequently shown becalmed and flickering with atmospheric light, a lambent image.
As a current exhibition, From the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts makes clear, early renderings of the landscape were mostly topographical.they described a settled terrain and abundant natural resources, becoming, in effect, what I would term “economic landscapes.” House portraits,
town views, civic improvements, new technology, waterways, transportation and even moralizing imagery all found descriptive representation in drawings, watercolors, paintings and prints.
It was the landscape work of Englishborn Philadelphia artist Thomas Birch and that of native son Thomas Doughty that helped inspire Thomas Cole toward a devotion to landscape painting. During a year-long residency in Philadelphia where Cole made drawings after plaster casts at the Pennsylvania Academy, he admired landscape works by Birch and Doughty on view in the Academy. Coupled with his thorough study of William Oram’s Precepts and Observations on the Art of Coloring in Landscape Painting, Cole set out to capture the natural landscape in a closely observed manner that moved away from the generalized and formulaic manner of earlier American landscapists like Doughty.
During the 1820s and while still to some degree under the influence of Romantic thinking derived from European innovations, Cole and his contemporaries began to view and represent the landscape as an imaginative subject albeit based on close observation.these works projected a vision rather than a view in the terms of art historian Edward Nygren. Artists brought a religious, literary and poetic instinct to their search for classic beautiful, picturesque or sublime subjects. They increasingly turned inland, toward the vast interior of the American continent, beginning prominently with the landscape bordering the Hudson River, from New York City and stretching into the largely unsettled areas of northern New England. Ironically, despite the term Hudson River School that was attached with some derision later in the century, the early generation of these artists seldom actually painted the river. Given the pioneering work in this regard by Thomas Cole, they could equally have been called the Catskill Mountain school.
Driven by ruminations on the unspoiled and redemptive value of a landscape that had barely felt the blow of an ax, they produced images that were sermonizing and, to some degree, reactionary pressing for preservation rather than exploration.this contrasted with the largely deforested European continent as described by Cole in his seminal Essay on American Scenery. The members of Cole’s generation of American landscape painters elegized the wild nature for its emotional content, advocating equipoise between man’s economic interests and their emotional well-being within the natural world.theirs was a losing battle. Inland waterways, both natural and man-made in the form of canals, succeeded by the railroad provided the impetus for further internal expansion.these artists had, in reality, mapped a landscape of promise for a land hungry generation.
In the aftermath of the Civil War and with new artistic strategies that gave weight to individual perception and private emotions, a more intimate form of representation emerged. Artists, rejecting the grand thematic and panoramic landscapes of cinematic mid-century painters Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, coupled with new aesthetic strategies that many had learned during European training and travel, developed new painterly styles.this was coupled with an emerging practice of plein air painting. The earlier tradition of sketching from life and developing compositions in the studio was replaced with on-site work. In search of new subjects and a more personal and meditative response to the many moods of landscape experience, painters spread out across the coastal American landscape and into more remote areas where regional schools developed as well.
In a retreat from the city whose economic and cultural expansion provided them with patronage,american painters found a perfect landscape in the still tranquil villages, fields and farmlands of New England, which also served as a restorative antidote to the cacophony of the emerging modern city. A range of small coastal villages in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine became the locus for artists’ perambulations and gave rise to the development of artist colonies. The stories of these colonies have been told in books and exhibitions over the last few decades as the interest in turn of the century American art has soared. Some of these have served as a fulcrum for new developments in American art and most have achieved a kind of legendary status. Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Gloucester, Provincetown, Ogunquit,
and Monhegan have all fostered some level of innovative activity. A veritable who’s who including Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, Childe Hassam,willard Metcalf, Ernest Lawson, Walt Kuhn, Gertrude Fiske, Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Bellows, Robert Laurent, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Rockwell Kent and Andrew Wyeth, were either directly associated with such colonies or enjoyed the supportive atmosphere of the presence of their artistic brotherhood during time spent at these locations.and it was almost axiomatic that the farther north these artists located, the more adventuresome and aggressive their work became.that aggression was either in the form of more dashing brushwork, non-idealized subjects, or more modern and abstract work, reflecting evolving revolutionary artistic theories.this, of course, is a broad generalization, but at least for these artists, the ones we now lionize, there is some validity.
Most artist colonies harbored a range of artistic motives and expressions. It is not surprising, however, that the first timidly established locations were close to New York City or a train ride away. And it is equally true that the southernmost of these included artists still in the thrall of impressionism, tonalism or an even more conservative manner of the Barbizon artists. But for many of them, and despite their coastal location, it was the landscape and all of its variations of light, seasonal color, atmosphere and even time of day and not the adjacent sea that attracted them. (There was the occasional school in these, or similar locations run by a single artist that became the regular resort of a polite or youthful and ambitious coterie.) As activity at the Connecticut art colonies began to fade in the aftermath of World War I and with the advent of the Great Depression, they took on a new life as museums dedicated to telling the story of their artistic past.the Bush-holley House, which had been the headquarters of the Cos Cob school and continued to be occupied by a Holley descendant, passed to the town of Greenwich in 1957 and now serves as both the home of the Greenwich Historical Society and a museum dedicated to telling the story of the Cos Cob school.
In Old Lyme, the Florence Griswold House was acquired a year before “Miss Florence’s” death in 1937 by a group of artists and friends who had formed the Florence Griswold Association and a decade later, opened the site on a seasonal basis as an art museum, thus also preserving the late Georgian mansion of 1817. Florence Griswold had been born in 1850,and by the time Henryward Ranger first visited Old Lyme in 1899, she was the sole family survivor.
Ranger had been immediately smitten with Old Lyme, noting “It looks like Barbizon, the land of Millet. See the knarled [sic] oaks, the low rolling country. This land has been farmed and cultivated by men, and then allowed to revert back into the arms of mother nature. It is only waiting to be painted.” In 1900, influenced by Ranger’s encouragement of fellow artists to join him in painting in Old Lyme, Griswold opened her home as a boarding house for professional artists who became members of the Lyme colony. She proved more than a landlady as she not only supported the conversion of barns and outbuildings to studios but offered artists’ works for sale in the house. She apparently cherished the great camaraderie that evolved including after-hours festivities characteristic of artist life of the period. In return for her encouragement, various artist residents painted small panels installed in the woodwork of the dining room.among those who called Old Lyme home at various moments were Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Henry Ward Ranger, Charles Ebert, Clark Voorhees, Everett Warner, Matilda Browne,william Chadwick, Ernest Albert, Edward Rook and Emil Carlsen. At the end of her life Griswold noted: “So you see, at first the artists adopted Lyme, then Lyme adopted the artists, and now, today, Lyme and art are synonymous.”
Over the years, Griswold had been forced to sell off much of the land adjacent to the house and after the establishment of the museum, much of the acreage has been acquired and reintegrated into the property, the last parcel as recently as 2016.This was one of the important achievements of Jeff Andersen who, some 40 years ago, became the first director of the museum and its only professional staff member. His achievement during the past decades has been impressive. From an average annual visitation of less than 1,000, the museum now hosts upward of
80,000 visitors, serviced by a staff of 20. The collections were greatly expanded in 2001 with the donation of 188 paintings and two sculptures by the Hartford Steam Boiler Company. That collection was assembled to show the artistic achievement of Connecticut artists from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.
Assembling an active board was critical in the growth of the museum. In 1998 the Museum’s Board of Trustees adopted an ambitious three-phase capital improvement plan designed to reunite the site’s historic features and extend the Museum’s capacity to serve growing audiences. Guided by an archaeological study, the first phase was completed in 1999 with the opening of the Hartman Education Center, an imaginatively reconstructed barn right in the center of the historic site. Phase Two was completed in 2002 with the construction of a new 10,000 square foot art gallery and collections storage facility designed as an addition to Marshfield.the final phase, completed in 2006, returned to the Griswold House itself and made major changes to its interior, restoring the house as an art colony boarding house, circa 1910.
The mission statement is compellingly direct:“the Florence Griswold Museum fosters the understanding of American art, with emphasis on the art, history, and landscape of Connecticut.” A critical piece of this was the restoration of the acreage and it has now fallen to Andersen’s successor, Becky Beaulieu, to fully realize the vision. There is, of course, some poetry in the fact that beau lieu means beautiful place!
While the Flogris, as it is commonly known, is not directly on the coast, it borders the Lieutenant River, a tidal river flowing into the Connecticut River estuary and ultimately into the Long Island Sound. It thus faces some of the challenges confronting many coast sites. Moreover, to fully represent the experience of the Old Lyme landscape as it was for the colony’s original members, a focus on that landscape becomes an important part of the museum’s story. Becky, with a background in nonprofit management, depends on her professional curatorial staff for matters of the art and has now generated a master plan for the entire institution.that means expansion of the existing special exhibition gallery, reorienting the focus equally on the surrounding land and providing pathways through the landscape.a master landscape plan has been commissioned from Stephen Stimson Associates. Ecology has joined art history as a part of the museum’s message.to underscore this, a current exhibition and installation brings the message to the fore.
Fragile Earth:the Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art includes works by Jennifer Angus, Mark Dion, Courtney Mattison and James Prosek.the exhibit’s curator Jennifer Stettler Parsons writes about the artists:“they transform natural and non-traditional materials, like insects and found debris, into art in order to make visible the human role in global climate change, and to reveal how our daily choices may endanger our planet’s future.” As the exhibition in the gallery will have closed by the time this article is published, I encourage you to visit it online at www.flogris.org. But I do have to mention the installation in the Florence Griswold House itself by Angus who is the first artist in residence at the site.when I first saw the installation (see illustration) of the bedroom with “Miss Florence” dressing for a costume ball, accompanied by Angus’ signature preserved bugs, my first thought was of Miss Havisham and Edward Gorey. My jocular response does not lessen the serious meaning of the presentation as described by the museum: “Jennifer Angus has staged an artistic intervention in Florence Griswold’s historic boardinghouse, activating the first floor with a theatrical display created with stunning preserved insects. Pinning insects to the walls in ornamental patterns, Angus creates surprising beauty, while also informing visitors of their importance to the ecosystem.”
I first encountered Angus in the exhibition Wonder, which inaugurated the restored Renwick Gallery, the branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum devoted to craft in all of its manifestations. The curator of that exhibition, Nicholas Bell, is one of a new generation of curators and scholars who seek to redefine craft, its meaning and influence, a topic I considered in a couple of my columns surrounding the Renwick opening.these were published in American Fine Art Magazine in the spring of 2016. Bell has now moved on to Mystic Seaport Museum, 23 miles north of Old Lyme. How Mystic is reframing its story of coastal Connecticut will be the subject of my next column, but I mention it now as one of the most exciting developments there is the implementation of a program of special exhibitors one of which will open as this article appears. Mystic will be the only North American venue of an exhibition of more than 90 watercolors by Joseph Mallord William Turner, the famed British marine painter and lent by the Tate Britain.this exhibition will take a fresh look at the artist’s work and most especially at his relation to the sea. Certainly, worth a visit as well.