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Finding Religion: American Art from the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection Krieble Gallery  Richard (Chairman, President and CEO of The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company) and Barbara Booth with Jeff Andersen, Museum Director Finding Religion is generously supported by grants from The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, The Starr Foundation, and the George A. and Grace L. Long Foundation. Visit Events for related programs. Free family program words+pictures pairs three age levels of children's books about photography with related hands-on art projects.  Harlan Page, Portrait of a Man, c. 1815Page was “born again” in Coventry, Connecticut, in 1814 and devoted his life to God. It is tempting to think that this is a self portrait, painted during America’s early-19th-century religious revival, known as the Second Great Awakening. In the wild tendrils of auburn hair, unblinking blue eyes, and erect posture of the feverish figure, shown against a fiery orange background, we see a man who may have been struck – as if by lightning – by the power of religion.In 1825 Page began work at the American Tract Society in New York, where he supervised its store of religious pamphlets (and wrote at least two). His biographer recalled that “A glow of heavenly ardor burned in our brother’s countenance.” The memoir was subtitled The Power of Prayer and Personal Effort for the Souls of Individuals and was issued in several editions.Religion has played a central role in American life from the earliest days of English colonization. In New England, a region of particular importance for the artists in this exhibition, 17th-century Puritan traditions remained profoundly influential well into the 1850s. The Bible continued to condition the way most Americans understood nature, history, and even their own family and domestic situations, through at least the 1920s. Even when scientific interests dominated the national psyche, in the 1840s and 1850s, religious convictions remained unshaken. New interpretations of geology, botany, and meteorology were generally seen as revelations of the way in which God worked. Later, when the desolation of the Civil War was everywhere apparent and the consequences of modern science -- and, more disturbingly, modern technology -- began to make themselves known, the belief in a benevolent God persisted, if it did not in fact intensify. Americans often looked inward then -- becoming nostalgic, and finding comfort in meditative states. For others, “religion” was centered in family, home, the landscape, and even the booming metropolitan world. Organized by Emily Weeks Florentino, the Museum’s former Curator of American Art, this exhibition offers a lens through which to view the various paths that American artists have taken in their quest to find religion -- and, in the process, America. The art has been selected from among the 190 works that were given to the Florence Griswold Museum in 2002 by the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company.
Between the 18th and early 20th centuries, nearly all American households – even those of slaves and the rural poor -- had a Bible. Robert Aitken (1735-1802) is credited with printing the first edition in America in 1782. His pocket-sized King James Version was widely circulated while England refused to allow Bibles to be imported by the rebellious colonists, during the embargo of the Revolutionary War. By the 1860s, America was awash in Bibles, which came in all languages, versions, sizes, and prices. Popular aesthetic theory held that tasteful objects could evoke purified emotions, so the more elaborate a Bible’s illustrations, binding, and locking mechanisms, the more pious its owner was perceived to be. A family Bible, prominently displayed in the formal parlor, readily communicated a householder’s wealth, values, social standing, and refined sensibility. Because faith was thought to be a matter of feeling rather than reason, spirituality became closely associated with women, who were regarded as more emotional than men. Like the Bible, related spiritual texts, such as commentaries, prayer books, hymnals, and inspirational memoirs, were important objects in the home. As keepers of the household, women were entrusted with imparting the contents and their lessons to their families. In paintings, women often press or clasp Bibles tightly, signaling their affinity with the teachings of the sacred text.  Dwight W. Tryon (1849-1925) Autumn, 1913 Landscapes of Belief Whenever organized religion has seemed too limiting, and the values of the modern metropolis too base, Americans have turned to the natural world. In the 19th century, popular philosophical movements held that nature was “God’s other book,” a sacred text of truly awesome proportions. Landscape painters wanted the beholder to see this. Thomas Cole invested landscapes with symbolism and mythological or religious narrative in order to express an apocalyptic vision. His visual sermons gave way to Frederic Edwin Church’s depictions of America’s ancient natural monuments, and to the message of divine purpose. At mid-century, the American landscape was celebrated as the New Eden.Civil War and rampant industrialization soon prompted artists to pursue a more intensely personal response to the American landscape. No longer so passionately engaged with the political world, the contemplative images of the late 19th century demonstrate a quieter, inward looking, somewhat melancholic form of spirituality. With the dawning of the 20th century, America’s attitude toward nature shifted yet again. Private experience, profound emotion, and a reality that lay beyond appearances still had relevance, but now the restricted palette, increased abstraction, and harmonious color modulations of Tonalism better conveyed the nostalgic mood of America. Pollution, overcrowding, economic depression, and war had done their parts to darken peoples’ spirits. Once again, it was the landscape that America and its artists reached out to. But now a different landscape was being painted: unpopulated, idealized, bathed in a vibrant, dreamlike glow – a memory of what had once been all around but was now fast fading away.
When the influential British art critic and philosopher John Ruskin (1813-1900) advised painters to “go to nature. . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,” it was not the transcendental nature worship of earlier American landscapists that he espoused, nor was it the vigorous, experiential plein-air painting of the early Impressionists. For Ruskin, the informed observance of nature was nothing less than “following the finger of God.” In his view, art, religion, and nature were inextricably intertwined.A reverential attitude toward nature already existed in America in the mid-19th century, and scientific interests were expanding, so Ruskin’s philosophy struck a chord. An American version developed, aided by the Englishman Thomas Charles Farrer (1839-1891), a Ruskin student. Farrer introduced American artists to a system of training that favored closely detailed depictions of “single leaves, small twigs and boughs, a lichened branch or stone…an apple or a pear, a pine-cone or a cluster of acorns, ” rather than the tradition of drawing from casts of antique sculpture. Artists, he declared, cannot be too rigorous in their devotion to truth.Converts to these ideas joined with Farrer to form the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, a version of the English Pre-Raphaelite art movement that Ruskin supported. Despite their popular nickname of “new men,” half the members would be female. Though the group disbanded in 1864, the movement continued, reaching its peak in 1867, but affecting some American artists for at least a decade afterward.  George de Forest Brush (1855-1941)In the Garden, 1923 Morality, Domesticity, and the Modern Madonna In the 1800s, religion in America was a matter of the heart rather than the mind. Since women and children were considered emotional by nature, they were seen as particularly sensitive to sacred images, objects, and spaces. Mothers became the spiritual authority in the home and their children’s first religious educator. Publishers provided them with appropriate texts and attractive illustrations to use as teaching tools, and they were aggressively encouraged by ministers, husbands, and the media to establish new religious traditions, such as passing the family Bible from generation to generation, and selecting hymns for their children to sing and Bible stories for them to read. Not surprisingly, given the home’s increasingly church-like air, a parallel was drawn between the American mother and child and the Madonna and Child.The impact of the Civil War caused the healing and nurturing powers of women and the sacrosanct space of the family home to become even more widely felt and more intensely intertwined. The idealization of women into Madonnas continued to hold sway until the end of the century, although primarily by then for members of the middle and upper classes. Strict thought systems promoted a cult of True Womanhood, which preached four cardinal feminine virtues: piety, purity, submission, and domesticity. Only after striking changes in the 20th century resulted in a more active role for women outside the home, such as their enlistment in the work force and their public struggle for the right to vote, did the modern Madonna cease to exist.
Art in America is a key facet of what has been called “civil religion.” The civil value of art has been understood to be that of a moral force, detached from organized religion but like it in its ability to refine and elevate -- and thereby purify -- the public soul. The formation of a citizenry capable of upholding such ideals of the American republic as liberty, justice, charity, and personal virtue appears to depend upon a shared belief in patriotic rituals, as well as in the symbolism of founding documents, public monuments, and other national icons. In the early 19th century, America’s wilderness spoke of divine promise, but it was the city that mattered at the century’s end. The booming metropolitan environment was proof of the nation’s productivity, and a country come of age. Moreover, the city, although fraught with problems, unified individuals and, like a church, offered a public space in which citizens could join in a spiritual observation of national unity. The gradual shift in America’s religious focus -- from reading the Bible to “reading” a monument, and from practicing pious acts to revering patriotic icons -- has led many to see modern America as secular. The situation was further complicated when the mid-19th-century’s reverence for motherhood and the home, and the pursuit of truth and beauty, yielded in some circles to an ardent quest for power, wealth, or leisure. Perhaps religion in America (and elsewhere) has something to do with where one looks to find it. |
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J. Alden Weir (1852-1919) Silver Chalice, Japanese Bronze and Red Taper, c. 1884-1889
Frederic E. Church (1826-1900)
John F. Kensett (1816-1872) 
Edward F. Rook (1870-1960)