Fresh Looks
Fresh Fields at the Florence Griswold Museum delves into the rich world of American Impressionist landscapes
The point of Fresh Fields is to expose the politics in the picturesque, to peel back the beauty—the daubs and strokes of oil paint, the emphasis on light, the sheer, gossamer airiness of American impressionism in order to examine the layers of history beneath those gorgeous surfaces. Curator Amy Kurtz Lansing has enlisted ecologists, local historians, specialists in the history of slavery and race, and Native Americans from the region to shed new light on works we may have taken for granted, demanding a revision, a “re-seeing,” a “seeing again.”
George Brainerd Burr’s oil on panel sketch, President Wilson’s Daughters, almost certainly done on the spot, epitomizes the exhibition’s ambitious aim in miniature.at first glance, the daughters, clad in long white dresses seem liberated from the strictures of their lives as Woodrow Wilson’s daughters.two chat amiably, another looks out over the water, thinking her own thoughts, while the central figure, bathed in the glow of a roaring bonfire, reaches up to loosen her hair.the trees enfold them like a bower; the bay acts as backdrop. young women find their inner nymph.the reading is feminist. Then you read the accompanying text and learn that Burr met Ellen Axson Wilson (a painter, and the President’s future wife) in 1910 at the artist’s colony that centered around what was then the Florence Griswold House.you learn that he met “the three Wilson daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor…most certainly the eldest daughter, Margaret, is standing at center, bathed in the glow of the fire, while surrounded by the wild darkness of the New England landscape.” And at last, the writer of the text, Matthew Warshauer, professor of history, reminds us that “Mrs. Wilson, who was from the South and retained segregationist views, returned
there to give birth to the two eldest daughters, as she didn’t want them to be ‘Yankees.’” we remember that for all his leadership during World War I and his dream of a League of Nations, President Wilson was himself a committed segregationist whose policies openly discriminated against Black citizens, opposed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and curtailed civil liberties during World War I to silence anti-war opposition from the left.
What are we to make of Wilson’s three daughters, reveling in their freedom under cover of darkness? What did they think? Did they rebel against the ingrained attitudes of their parents, or did they play their role? With a deeper understanding of history, our reading of this little work becomes much more complex, even contradictory, as it becomes entangled with our own beliefs and the turmoil of our own times.as difficult as it is, this feels like a necessary correction to the idea of American impressionism as a simple exercise in beauty and an engagement with nostalgia.
From an ecological standpoint, the land in the landscapes that predominate in the museum is not some static, nostalgic geographical feature.yes, time and modernity have transformed the depicted places, but in many cases, the land, once cleared for farming, has returned to forest.yet it is a different forest, with different trees and foliage—invasive and introduced species, like the Norway maple—and in a land altered by climate change.the boulder in William Chadwick’s Bathers at Griswold Beach, for example, sits well above the high-water mark, but as Carolyn Wakeman observes, neither the beach, nor even the boulder, are permanent features. “nehantic graves above the beach,” wakeman writes, “were said to be visible until a fierce gale in September 1815 washed away the tall bank, removing all traces of the native burying ground,” and “today as rising sea levels accelerate coastal erosion, the boulder sits a hundred feet offshore.”
Ecologist Judy Preston discusses Wilson Henry Irvine’s paintings, Saybrook Light and The Broken Wall as depictions of moments in a fluctuating cycle of “cleared-to-covered hillsides,” stating, “the chances are that the open hilltop pictured is now largely forested, but there remain clues to its past. If the owner abandoned this hilltop the day after this painting was completed, a gradual and time-honored process of plant (and animal) succession would have begun, leaving behind clues,” like the “stone walls” that “today seem to wander through the woods, a relic of the back-breaking effort it once took to clear and define fields.”