George H. Durrie (1820-1863)
Summer Landscape, 1862
Oil on canvas, 22 x 30”
Signed and dated lower left

Fellow Hudson River School artists generally painted pure landscape, but New Haven’s Durrie was one of the first to show that the Connecticut countryside had inhabitants, who were nurtured by the land. In the 1700s, American artists depicted farms as visual inventories of a farmer’s possessions. A century later, Durrie shaped the same elements into a landscape setting that affects people physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

His idylls seemed faithful representations of 19th-century rural New England to many who saw Currier & Ives prints of his work. Some people must have known that he was painting a lovely myth, but only art critics seemed to mind.