West Rock in Landscape Painting

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By Joseph Skiffington


“One cannot contemplate these eminences without admiring them, as forming bold and beautiful features in the scenery around New Haven …. They are composed of precipitous cliffs of naked frowning rock, hoary with time, moss-grown and tarnished by a superficial decomposition, looking like an immense work of art.” (Boer, Wareham, 5) This was a description of New Haven, East Rock, and West Rock by the acclaimed Yale scientist Benjamin Silliman. (Boer, 5) The natural of beauty of New Haven and its towering rocky guardians has been something that has captivated the mind and inspiration of many painters especially from about 1825-1880 when landscape painting emerged as an influential artistic movement.

West Rock Ridge stands seven hundred feet tall at its highest point made of volcanic rock known as dolerite which when in contact with oxygen gives it its characteristic red color. With a sheered face and its twin East Rock guarding New Haven at the opposite side, West Rock stands tall as half a gateway to the scenic beauty that New Haven has to offer, with some of the best vantage points of the city coming at its peak. As the nation grew ever more crowded and populous in its cities and what was once green and natural grew ever more grey and industrial Americans longed for America’s rustic connection to nature. Landscape painting helped satisfy a feeling of nostalgia in Americans' hearts.

 The Hudson River School was an artistic movement in the mid-19th century that was largely based on romanticizing nature, a stark contrast to what was occurring in the urban and industrial revolution that was taking place in cities all over the nation. This was not just an artistic revolution, but a cultural and personal one as well. Joel T Headley was a travel writer and Protestant minister who felt that life and civilization become stale, so he ventured to explore nature and reembrace the connection mankind has to it. (Simpson, 562 ) Headley described this aesthetic, “And how solemn it is to move all day through a majestic colonnade of trees and feel that you are in a boundless cathedral whose organ notes swell and die away with the passing wind like some grand requiem.” (Simpson, 562). The artists that played the largest role in this movement involving West Rock were Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole, his protege Frederic Church, and while not formally a member, a student of its style and practice George Henry Durrie.

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was from England but still found his inspiration in the Americas, including the mountains and hills of New England. Cole was notable for infusing a sense of grandeur into his paintings usually exemplifying the sense of reverence he had for nature into his works. His works of art usually made natural features such as mountains and rivers much larger in scale than they would be realistically, also the few paintings where he includes people they are diminutive in comparison to the grandness of nature. (William L. Coleman, Spotlight Essay: Thomas Cole)

Frederic Church (1826-1900) was from an affluent Connecticut family and as such was destined to be a doctor or lawyer, but had his father begrudgingly arranged an apprenticeship with Thomas Cole. (Wilson, 22) Interestingly, in one of Church’s more prominent works, on West Rock he decided to paint an angle that left out the town of Westville, which was an odd choice as Westville in the mid-19th century was a growing point of pride for the region. (Wilson, 32) Though the majority of the city is obscured by the canopy of trees one can make out the top of a church steeple to exemplify the prominence and stature nature has over the life of humanity.

Henry Durrie (1820-1863) was a Connecticut native, born in Hartford, and moved to New Haven around 1843 where he remained until his death. Durrie has a notable style of framing his paintings with trees both prominent in the foreground and strewn throughout the landscape. Durrie’s daughter had explained that her father was connected to the place he grew up and lived, never feeling the urge to move to a place where his art may be more prominent this is reinforced by Durrie’s own writings in which he states that he is happy with his place in the community and didn’t feel the need to venture elsewhere to indulge his artistic passion. (Durrie Journal) The New Haven Daily Register spoke of him as such, “He was unobtrusive in his life, and probably shared to as great an extent as any one the respect of the community.” (“New Haven Daily Register.” New Haven Daily Register, 1863.) 

Both Durrie and Church have had their West Rock paintings regarded as exemplary works of the time and of the greater landscape movement that they were both apart of. The commonality amongst the painters is notable as they all romanticize the simplicity and frame West Rock within the beauty of the New Haven landscape. West Rock was ultimately a point of inspiration in an area rapidly changing from industrialization but its natural background to a growing cityscape never spurned imagination but rather enhanced and exemplified it.

    Courtesy of the New Haven Museum.

    Courtesy of The New Britain Museum of Art.

Bibliography 
Boer, Jelle Zeilinga De, and John Wareham. New Havens Sentinels. The Art and Science of East Rock and West Rock. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2014.

Church, Frederic Edwin. West Rock, New Haven. 1849, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britian, Connecticut.

Coleman, William L. "Spotlight Essay: Thomas Cole." Sam Fox School. February 2016.                                  Http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/node/11262.

Durrie, George Henry. West Rock, New Haven. 1853, New Haven Museum, New Haven, Connecticut.

George Henry Durrie Papers, MSS 16, New Haven Museum, New Haven, Connecticut.

Simpson, Charles R. "The Wilderness in American Capitalism: The Sacralization of Nature." International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 5, no. 4 (1992): 555-76.

Wilson, Christopher Kent. "The Landscape of Democracy: Frederic Church's "West Rock, New Haven"." American Art Journal 18, no. 3 (1986): 20-39.

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