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The art colonies of New England

Magazine Antiques, April, 1999 by Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Tracie Felker

The art colonies of New England played an important role in defining the region as venerable. Soothing visions of small coastal towns, soaring church spires, and covered bridges gained great currency as the country faced the challenges of life in the industrial age. Despite the similarity of subjects, however, the styles in which New England was portrayed varied greatly within a fairly short period of time. This study of the art colonies at Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Ogunquit, Maine, shows how the common goal of presenting and celebrating the past transcended artistic categories to create a seamless image of old New England.

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During the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, Old Lyme, near the mouth of the Connecticut River, was a small but prosperous port trading with the West Indies, Holland, Ireland, and China, among other destinations. Wealthy merchants and ships' captains built handsome houses along the elm-lined streets. However, shipbuilding and commerce dwindled after mid-century, when the shallow harbor could no longer accommodate ever larger vessels, and the town grew little over the next half century.

In 1899 the American artist Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916) came to Old Lyme in search of picturesque scenery suitable for his Barbizon-inspired landscape paintings. He was delighted with what he found:

It looks like...the land of Millet. See the knarled 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.(1)

Frank Vincent DuMond (1865-1961), one of the first artists working in Old Lyme and one of its most famous teachers, concurred:

Lyme...possess[es] remarkable advantages in its great variety, which ranges from the low land of estuaries and salt-meadows to the rugged, romantic beauty of rolling glacial bills, here and there ground down to their naked granite structure. Jagged ledges, seams, bowlders, and shattered bits of rock break into the gentle rhythm of the uplands; patches of forest and groups of great oaks cling to their sides, and the gray stone fences still squirm about the barren meadows of a hundred years ago. The village is one of the oldest in New England, and is one of the few remaining places which still possesses the characteristics expressive of the quiet dignity of other days.(2)

Word spread quickly among Ranger's friends that Old Lyme offered many of the advantages of plein-air painting in Europe: a picturesque landscape, hospitable and inexpensive lodgings, and a quiet village rich in historical associations. Following Ranger's lead, several artists came to Old Lyme in the summer of 1900 to establish one of the first art colonies in the United States. With easy access to New York City by railroad and the collegial spirit of the group itself, the art colony in Old Lyme lasted for more than twenty-five years, although its heyday was considerably shorter.

The earliest art colonists in Old Lyme painted in the tonalist style, characterized by a somber, monochromatic palette, blurred contours, and the soft definition of forms. Inspired by such Barbizon painters as Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) and Narcisse Diaz de la Pena (1807-1876), this aesthetic gave way to impressionism shortly after the arrival of Frederick Childe Hassam in Old Lyme in 1903. Like the tonalists, the impressionists painted poetic pastoral and woodland views, but they also turned their attention to the indigenous colonial architecture and overgrown flower gardens that lined the streets of the village. Everett Longley Warner's Guardian Elm (Pl. II), a portrait of the eighteenth-century Justin Smith house, typifies the impressionist approach to these scenes. In the painting, a white clapboard house nestles under a towering elm. The house is embraced by the gently arching limbs of the tree and is visually rooted to the landscape by its identification with the elm - a tree considered distinctively American and then highly valued for its longevity, strength, and grace. The scene, with its warm golden light, evokes nostalgia for the security and simplicity of bygone days whose remoteness from the present can be measured by the height and girth of the aged tree.

The colonial house, particularly the saltbox, was closely identified with the values and way of life of preindustrial New England. As early as 1886 the influential art critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer (1851-1934) declared that such buildings were "distinctively American, thoroughly original in effect," personifying the "neat, cheerful, pretty domesticity" of the old New England village where "poverty, squalor, and unthrift" were kept out.(3) Her characterization of the New England village as exempt from social ills reflected the contemporary sentiment that the values that had sustained the birth and early settlement of America had been lost in the crush of modern life. The unprecedented wave of immigration, industrial expansion, and economic depression of the last decades of the nineteenth century created an identity crisis in American culture. The revival of interest in all things colonial during this period can be seen as an attempt to provide alternative social and political models to those found at the time in contemporary urban culture and immigrant populations.

The art colonies of New England

Magazine Antiques, April, 1999 by Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Tracie Felker

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