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The
American Artist in Connecticut: Introduction |
Discovering
the Connecticut Landscape
: 2 Connecticut’s domestication was now its charm. Its stone walls, fences, white church spires, old houses, roads, and streams are in the new landscape paintings. The state’s iconic tree, the Charter Oak, appears to abut common farmland in Frederic Church’s painting of it, for the artist chose to ignore a mansion at the downtown Hartford site. New Haven’s monumental West Rock, important in Colonial history, is a backdrop for agrarian scenes in paintings by other artists, such as Benjamin Coe, who was Church’s first teacher, and George Durrie. Moreover, artists painted views in Connecticut that were markedly different from the dramatic work they did elsewhere, as when Worthington Whittredge and George Loring Brown, leading chroniclers of the American West and of Europe, painted cabbages in Simsbury and oystering in Norwalk. >next 1 . 2 . 3 |