Digital Exhibits

New Haven in Nineteenth-Century Landscape Art

 Joseph Skiffington


Thomas Cole
The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1836
Oil on Canvas
New York Historical Society

Thomas Cole is generally accepted as the founder of the Hudson River School, an art movement denoted by its romantic interpretations of American landscapes. Regarded as one of Cole’s most well know and famous paintings, done in the traditional Cole style of nature imposing itself over civilization and the romantic idealism of a more pastoral American lifestyle. Boer and Wareham in their book New Haven’s Sentinels, make the claim that through correspondence Cole had as well as the geological structure of mountain depicted in the foreground that this painting could well have been inspired by West Rock. The claim is bolstered by the sheer face depicted on the mountain as well as the reddish hue of the rock, both of which are emblematic of West Rock. We see several farmers this was a feature of many Cole’s paintings where he would romanticize the more agrarian lifestyle that Americans had in the earlier nineteenth century. 



Frederic Edwin Church
West Rock, New Haven, 1847
Oil on Canvas
New Britain Museum of American Art

Church was a pupil of the renowned landscape painter Thomas Cole, though a student Cole sought to paint much more remote and symbolic paintings as opposed to his teacher who was often noted for his grandiose and dramatic landscape scenes. The small but noticeable church steeple was a noted style of Church’s who would often sign or find a way to include a symbolic representation his surname. According to Gary Knoble of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the stylistic approach of church may have a deeper meaning and display a fondness for wordplay, such as the inclusion of churches in his paintings as well as the evolution of this painting to include a field as a reference to the picture’s recipient Cyrus W. Field, the inventor of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable. This piece depicts another popular artistic approach of Church’s work where as we can see the painting is very balanced the sky is broken up by the clouds. The land is divided by West Rock and the West River, no one aspect is dominant in this piece. This work is also a remarkable example of Church’s most noted skill, depicting hyper realistic landscapes, dynamic lighting schemes, and the romanticizing of the American landscape.


George Henry Durrie
Winter Scene in New Haven, 1858
Oil on Canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum

George Henry Durrie was known for his paintings that eventually became lithographs sold by the Currier and Ives company. Durrie was born in Hartford, Connecticut and eventually moved to New Haven where he taught himself the art of portrait painting. Durrie eventually began to paint landscapes, the most notable being winter scenes which were among his most famous and well received works. Though not a student of the Hudson River School as Cole and Church, Durrie was certainly inspired by the notions of romanticizing the more rural American lifestyle. The differences between Cole and Durrie are noticeable where Cole’s paintings are traditional very colorful and depict a looming environment, Durrie’s paintings tend to evoke a much calmer vision of nature. In this painting of rural New Haven Countty, we see a typical Durrie art style where he frames much of the painting with trees as we can see on the left-hand side and in the foreground on the right.


George Henry Durrie
West Rock, New Haven, 1853
Oil on Canvas
New Haven Museum

While not a New Haven native, Durrie often depicted many of its most famous landmarks upon moving to the city and opening his art studio. Durrie often liked to pronounce the elements of nature and the rapidly industrializing society that swept America, and New England particularly in the mid-nineteenth century. This piece as we can see helps to reflect that stark contrast with a looming West Rock imposing itself over a small village, but in the middle of the painting we can see what appears to be a smokestack, indicative of Westville and the West River and an early industrial center in the history of New Haven. As mentioned previously the framing of the painting with trees is also noted in this painting as well. Also, notable in this painting we see one of Durrie’s other skills use the excellent use of light to give the painting greater depth and a sense of time passing in his works. 


George Henry Durrie
Judges Cave, West Rock 1856
Oil on Canvas
New Haven Museum 

Here we see another of New Haven’s signature landmarks, Judges Cave. The notorious hideout of two of the “regicide judges” Whalley and Goffe who sentenced Charles I to death and fled to New Haven for fear of prosecution by Charles II. As we saw before the stylistic approaches do not differ greatly as we again see the framing of this image with a prominent tree in the left foreground and the use of light to draw one’s eye to the cave itself. Durrie almost always includes people in his paintings, a symbol to his early life as a portrait painter and to show the harmony of people and nature that so inspired much of the American Romantic Style. In this piece we can see the last type of artistic approach Durrie undertook which was the wide color palette used in his paintings. Durrie and his contemporaries were often critical of the oversimplification of colors used in painting, especially older landscape paintings, which may have inspired Durrie’s vast array of detail and colors in this painting.


Bibliography
George Henry Durrie Papers, MSS-16, New Haven Museum, New Haven, CT.

Howat, John K. "The Hudson River School." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 30, no. 6 (1972): 272-83.

Knoble, Gary. Art Historian, New Britain Museum of American Art

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.

"Some Masterpieces of "The Hudson River School" of Landscape Painting." The Art World 3, no. 3 (1917): 180-87.

Troyen, Carol. "The Incomparable Max: Maxim Karolik and the Taste for American Art." American Art 7, no. 3 (1993): 65-87.

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

Zeilinga De Boer, Jelle, and John Wareham. New Haven's Sentinels: The Art and Science of East and West Rock. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013.


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