The Arts in Connecticut

By Christine Brendel Scriabine, Guilford, Connecticut

see also An Art School Forged in the Gilded Age.

For historic and geographic reasons Connecticut has never been a leader in the arts, but it has nurtured a number of major artists and contributed to the artistic life of the nation. The Puritan founders of the colony were Hebraic in their disdain far religious representation, and their Calvinism led them to scorn the merely ornamental. Consequently the Puritan-Yankee mind did not turn to the fine arts for expression, and in the Colonial Period most creative urges were almost exclusively channeled into the production of well-designed practical objects. The neatly balanced church steeple, the whimsically carved gravestone, the shapely tool, the handsome clock, and the intricately carved chest best expressed the creative genius of colonial Connecticut. In the National Period, when Puritan inhibitions had somewhat dissipated, artistic production in the state was inhibited by the small size and lack of great wealth of the state's cities. If they stayed at home, Connecticut's artists lacked both the patronage and creative interchange that large urban centers could provide. To produce and sell monumental works, the state's artists have often had to migrate to New York or Boston.

Of all the fine arts, painting has flourished longest and brightest in Connecticut. By the end of the Colonial Period, many of Connecticut's leading citizens had accumulated enough wealth and had progressed far enough away from the Puritan stricture against self-aggrandizement and ornamentation to wish to be immortalized in portraits and to decorate their houses with painted scenes. Between c. 1770 and c. 1830 the state produced a flourishing school of primarily itinerant painters who specialized in portraiture. These artists are classified as "folk painters" because their work is characterized by certain stylistic naivetes not shared by the professionally trained artists of the period. Their pictures can be identified by their flat surfaces and hard edges. These characteristics resulted not only from an inadequate understanding of perspective but also from the fact that their stylistic models were prints rather than paintings. The distortions that derived from inadequate artistic training were, in the best examples of the school, compensated for by the use of lively patterns and well-balanced harmonious designs.

Connecticut's premier folk portraitist and leader of the Connecticut School of Painting was Ralph Earle (1751-1801). Earle's first significant achievement was not in the field of portraiture but rather in the area of historical painting. In the 1770s he had just settled down in New Haven and opened a portrait studio when he heard of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. He volunteered to go along with the Governor's Guard to the scenes of the action. Once there he did sketches of the terrain and participants in the battles. He then returned to New Haven to do battle paintings. These were turned into engravings by the New Haven engraver, Amos Doolittte, and widely sold. Earle's battle scenes were probably the first historical pictures ever executed by an American artist. Of more influence on the state's other artists were his portraits. He created a fashion for portraits with the sitter in plush but realistic American backgrounds. He was good at making his subjects, particularly children, human and at carefully rendering detail. Earle's talent was recognized by the British Royal Academy, which voted him into membership when he was abroad in 1783.

The state supported a considerable number of other portrait painters. Joining Earle in New Haven was Reuben Moulthrop (1763-1814). Moulthrop, who was born in East Haven, primarily supported himself as a wax sculptor and proprietor of a wax works museum and traveling show. Between shows he painted portraits. The Beardsley limner was also active in the area between 1785 and 1805, during which time he painted settlers in Connecticut and Massachusetts along the Boston Post Road. Winthrop Chandler's (1747-1790) subjects were concentrated in the Woodstock area. Chandler first worked as a house and sign painter and then branched out into portraits and landscapes. In the late eighteenth century folk landscapes were painted primarily to be used as overmantel panels and fireboards. In a slightly later period, the traditions of the school were carried on by Amni Phillips and Isaac Sheffield. Phillips (1788-1865), who was born in Colebrook and painted in New York and Connecticut, is one of the most admired of American folk artists and his works include the famous Kent limner series, painted in the Kent area. Sheffield (1798-1845) was born in Guilford and painted in and around New London. He is best known for his portraits of whaling families and sea captains. Other folk portraitists include Captain Simon Fitch of Lebanon, John Brewster, Jr., of Hampton and William and Richard Jennys.

Before the advent of photography in the 1850s, miniature paintings were an alternative to full-sized portraits and were often commissioned by those not wealthy enough to engage a portrait painter. In the early nineteenth century, one of the nation's outstanding miniaturists was Anson Dickinson (1779-1852), who was born in Milton and grew up in Litchfield. Dickinson, who practiced his trade up and down the East Coast, spent considerable periods in Connecticut capturing the likenesses of many of the state's residents in handsome miniatures done on ivory.

The most famous of the state's early painters was John Trumbull, the son of Connecticut's Revolutionary War governor, Jonathan Trumbull (1710-1785). Trumbull was born in Lebanon in 1756 and educated at the Lebanon Academy and Harvard. During this time he studied art from books. During the Revolutionary War he enlisted as an officer in the First Regiment of Connecticut and participated in the taking of Boston and the invasion of Canada. He resigned from the army in 1778 and in 1780 sailed to Europe. He ended up in London and studied in the studio of Benjamin West, the great American painter. In a later period, when back in West's studio, he started his great series of scenes from the Revolutionary War. These nine paintings would be done with unfailing accuracy. Many of the heads of the figures were drawn from life, and the terrains of the battle scenes were verified in place. These paintings were in the country's most important series of historical paintings and were found so significant at the time that George Washington helped to arrange for the sale of prints from the paintings.

After 1804 Trumbull returned to the United States for longer periods and lived as a portrait painter in New York. After the War of 1812 he painted four of the eight twice-lifesized paintings commissioned to decorate the rebuilt Capitol rotunda. When his talent declined in his old age, he gave his small oil portraits of Revolutionary characters to Yale with the provision that he be given an annuity of $1,000 while he lived. It was anticipated that admission fees to the exhibit of the paintings would yield an income over cost. Trumbull spent the last years of his life, 1837-1841, in New Haven writing his biography. His paintings are still at Yale and are the foundation of the Yale Art Gallery collection.

The next generation of Connecticut painters is, perhaps, best represented by Nathaniel Jocelyn (1796-1881) of New Haven. Jocelyn was an academic artist who had studied painting and belonged to the academy. His works are quietly tempered, soft with a smooth surface texture, and show an accomplished handling of perspective. His most famous picture is a portrait of Cinque, leader of the Amistad rebellion, which today hangs in the New Haven Colony Historical Society. Jocelyn never achieved widespread fame, but one of his pupils, George Henry Durrie (1820-1865) did. Durrie had the advantage not only of Jocelyn's tutelage but also of being one of the first of the state's artists afforded the chance to learn from the eighty-two paintings by such artists as Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull and Thomas Cole in the Wadsworth Atheneum, opened in the 1840s.

Between 1853 and 1857 Durrie found the subject matter that he would make his own—an isolated farmhouse or inn located on a snow-covered road with one or two farmers and/or sleigh approaching or leaving. Many of his paintings were to be used as the basis for the prints of Currier and Ives, and his images would become the basis for national perceptions of New England life. In many ways Durrie's work finds the essence of Connecticut art and life in the mid-nineteenth century. In limiting his landscapes to scenes from farm life, he fostered an appreciation for the optimism, independence and domesticity that marked Connecticut life in the period.

Two other famous landscape painters also had Connecticut backgrounds. John F. Kensett was born in Cheshire in 1818, where he was to learn the trade of banknote engraver. He then studied art in Europe and eventually settled in New York. His most famous landscapes capture New York scenes such as the "Genessee River" and "Lake George," but occasionally he returned to his native state to paint scenes such as "Afternoon on the Connecticut Shore." Frederick Church (1826-1900), who was born in Hartford, strove to be both technically realistic and spectacular. While one of his early artistic successes was a picture of "Haying Near New Haven" (1849), his landscapes more generally were of spectacular scenery bathed in spectacular light. Typical of his output are subjects such as "Heart of the Andes," "Icebergs," and "View of Quebec."

Some of the spirit of these painters who provided a romantic rendering of American nature scenes was passed on to the next generation of Connecticut artists who also concentrated on nature and landscape. The American impressionists sought in the familiar commonplaces of the American countryside, particularly the Connecticut countryside, an escape from urban problems and capitalism and a reestablishment of communal values. In this spirit Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916), the founding father of American impressionism, established an art colony at Old Lyme. Other art colonies and art associations would emerge in Greenwich, Cos Cob, Mystic, Essex, and Noank. These colonies drew the finest of America's impressionists such as John H.  Twachtman (1853-1902), J. Alden Weir (1852-1919), Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), Childe Hassam (1859-1902), Willard Metcalf (1858-1925), and Theodore Robinson (1852-1896). Many of these artists would paint a number of their finest works in Connecticut. One of the objectives of impressionist painting was to express the artist's intimate personal reaction to the nature of the land. In no other school of art was the sense of place so vital, and in the paintings of the American impressionists the nature of Connecticut's land and waterscape in a particular moment in time was captured and immortalized. The most celebrated paintings of the school include: Hassam's "Bridge at Old Lyme" (1908), Robinson's "Sloop Cove" (1894), Twachtman's "November Haze" (1897-8), Weir's "Building a Dam, Shetucket" (1908), and Ernest Lawson's "Yacht Club-Night, Greenwich" (c. 1894).

The impressionists ended one tradition in art in Connecticut and began another. They were the last in a line of artists who tried to catch the particular in the state's landscape and people. Modern art seeks to find a different reality in the abstract and/or interior. The impressionists were the first in a long line of artists who would find the Connecticut countryside an escape from the high rents and competitive atmosphere of New York. Today Connecticut serves primarily as a refuge for established artists.

Connecticut's literary heritage is not as rich as its artistic heritage. At first literature in the state was blighted by Calvinism, and later writers, like artists, were drawn away from the state by the magnetic poles of Boston and New York. Few writers can be identified who spent their whole lives in the state, and few local traditions in literature were consequently established.

While not an artist, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was one of Connecticut's first native-born writers of talent. Edwards was born in East Windsor and was graduated from Yale in 1720. He became one of New England's foremost preachers and a leader of the Great Awakening while minister to a congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts. His burning and poetic sermons such as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and "God Glorified in the Work of Redemption by the Greatness of Man's Dependence on Him in the Whole of It" were widely acknowledged as brilliant at the time and stand today as superior examples of American evangelical literature.

The works of the Hartford or Connecticut Wits fall in quite another tradition. The group at various times included Theodore Dwight (1764-1846), Joel Barlow (1754-1812), John Trumbull (1750-1831), Noah Webster (1758-1843), Lemuel Hopkins (1750-1801), Richard Alsop (1761-1815), and Timothy Dwight (1752-1817). They were the first closely knit coterie of men with literary talent in America and were, for a brief historical moment, the creators of a truly Connecticut literature. As a group, the Hartford Wits were motivated by conservative political and religious beliefs to produce literature that established a national literary tradition and at the same time satirized the liberalism and egalitarianism of Jefferson and his fellowers. Their work expressed, in a witty manner, the Federalist convictions of most of the state's citizens.

One of the finest works of the group is the Anarchaid (1786-7), an unsigned work usually attributed to Trumbull, Humphreys, Barlow, and Hopkins. The work tried to expose the folly of warfare waged against the nation by promoters of local rebellion, paper money, and selfish greed. Individual works include John Trumbull's M'Fingal (1775-82), a mock-epic burlesque of Tory politics; Timothy Dwight's The Conquest of Canaan, an epic in twelve books; and Joel Barlow's The Vision of Columbus (1787) and Columbia (1807), epic poems that sought to create a literature worthy of America.

Noah Webster, who started as a member of the Hartford Wits, had an influence that extended far beyond that of the group. Motivated by nationalism, Webster prepared a spelling book, a grammar, and a reader—books that dominated American classrooms in the early National Period. He also wrote political, economic, medical, and historical tracts. His greatest achievement was his American Dictionary of the English Language. This dictionary established American usage. In the early National Period, through the works of Webster and the Wits, Connecticut writers gave to the nation a vision of what they thought the nation's literature and language should be. Their vision was nationalistic, conservative, communal, and literate. This vision would not predominate but would serve as an alternative to what came to be American literature's prevailing liberal, individualistic and experimental mode.

In the next generation the literature of the state was enriched by the works of Fitz-Greene Hallack (1790-1867), John G. C. Brainard (1796-1828), and Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865). Sigourney, "The Sweet Singer of Hartford," was the best known of the poetic trio and is to modern literary historians a symbol of the pious moralism of the period. She began her career with Moral Pieces (1815) and soon followed it with book after book of sentimental poems focused on tombstones, widows, brides, olive buds, willow trees, and tears. She was one of the most popular American poets of the period. Fits-Greene Hallack's verse was in a slightly more robust tradition. His best poems, Marco Bozzaris, Green Be the Turf Above, and Almwick Castle, were popular recitation pieces. John G.C. Brainard of New London wrote pieces that breathed the spirit of the nature of his native state. Titles such as The Black Fox of Salmon River, The Shad Spirit, Fort Griswold, and The Sea-Bird's Song evoke a sense of place even for modern readers.

Two Connecticut authors were closely connected with the events of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Henry Howard Brownell was born in 1820 in Providence but spent most of his life in East Hartford. He became the "Battle Laureate" of the Civil War with poetic works such as Bay Fight and River Fight. John William De Forest (1826-1906), a native of Humphreysville, served in the Civil War and later as an agent for the Freedman's Bureau in South Carolina. While in service in the war, he wrote some of the finest contemporary pieces on the war for Harper's Monthly and after the war wrote Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, the first realistic novel of the Civil War. In a romantic era he sounded a call to literary realism and would continue to do so for the next thirty years.

The most famous writers in Connecticut in the mid-nineteenth century were associated with Nook Farm in Hartford. Between 1853 and 1873 this small literary colony became a center of American literature. Nook Farm was not a point of origin for literary careers but rather a place where established writers came for literary companionship and artistic refreshment. In many ways Nook Farm served the same function for authors in the 1860s and 1870s that Old Lyme or Cos Cob would serve for the impressionists in a later era.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield in 1811 and was educated and later taught school in Hartford. She moved to Cincinnati in 1832 and later, while living in Brunswick, Maine, began to write Uncle Tom's Cabin (1861). In 1864 she returned to Hartford and lived at Nook Farm for part of each year until her death in 1896. Her books of the later period, Oldtown Folks (1869), Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories (1872), and Poganuc People (1878), like some of her earlier works such as The Minister's Wooing (1859), are excellent studies of New England life and character.

The most famous productions of Nook Farm were those by Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were all written at Nook Farm but cannot be classified as Connecticut literature since they reflected Twain's pre-Hartford years. A better claim can be made for A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889), which owes something to the character of the state's people, and for The Gilded Age (1873), which resulted from a collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900).

After the death of Stowe, it is difficult to classify any Connecticut writer as a native voice, but two modern writers, Eugene O'Neill and Wallace Stevens, have been closely associated with the state. Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), who lifted American drama to the level of art and molded a native, tragic stage literature, had his only real home in childhood in New London. This city would serve as the backdrop for some of his greatest works such as Ah Wilderness, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, and it was while living there as a young man that he wrote his first one-act plays. It was also in New London that he had as a child acquired his love for ships and the sea and that as a young reporter for the New London Telegraph he began his explorations into the underside of life. For Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Hartford was a place to make a living and refuge from the literary life. Stevens was an insurance executive and one of the greatest of America's modern poets, but the reality he sought in his poetry was an interior one and owed little to his physical surroundings. He lived in Connecticut but was not of it.

While Connecticut is currently the home of masters of modern literature such as Arthur Miller and Robert Penn Warren, they can hardly be classified as Connecticut writers. Their sensibilities were formed in other climes, their works have other backgrounds, and their vision is directed to the metropole. In the present, regional literature can only survive in remoter orbits.

Many of the same forces that have doomed regional art and literature—improved transportation and communication, a metropolitan outlook, and proximity to New York and Boston—have enriched the performing arts in modern Connecticut. The state does not have a long or rich heritage in these arts. The Puritan founders and their spiritual descendants considered the theater wicked and kept the stage lights off until almost the mid-nineteenth century. Even sacred music was suspect in many quarters until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and secular music only began to thrive in the state in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. After 1850 musical and theater performances became more available in Connecticut. Entertainment was provided primarily by touring artists and companies. By the end of the century even some of the state's smaller cities were served by touring companies. The 1890's also saw the founding of the state's first symphony orchestra in New Haven. Live performances in most of the state's cities decreased in number after the introduction of talking pictures in the late 1920s. A notable exception to this rule was the Shubert Theater in New Haven, which served for sixty years as a try-out theater for plays on their way to Broadway until it closed in 1976. It was reopened in 1981 as a center of the performing arts.

The tide away from live, professional theater in Connecticut began to turn in 1955 when the American Shakespeare Theater opened in Stratford, and the state got its first professional repertory company. In the mid-1960s the theater blossomed in Connecticut with the founding of the Hartford Stage Company in 1964, Long Wharf Theater in 1965, and the Yale Repertory Theater in 1966. These companies and numerous other summer stock, musical, and semiprofessional groups have been responsible for creating a vibrant and flourishing theater in the state.

Music and the dance have also flourished in modern Connecticut. The Connecticut College Dance Festival served as the midwife for many innovations and the development of now classical pieces in modern dance, and the dance school has helped to train a good portion of the practitioners of this art. The state also has two symphony orchestras, two ballet companies, an opera company, and numerous summer music festivals. Increased leisure and education have not only provided audiences for the arts but have also led to vastly increased participation in the arts. The future bodes well for the performing arts in Connecticut.

For Further Reading

Clark, George L. A History of Connecticut: Its People and Institutions. New York, 1914.

Connecticut and American Impressionism. Storrs, 1980.

Ebert, John and Katherine. American Folk Painters. New York, 1975.

Flexner, James Thomas. That Wilder Image: The Painting of America's Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer. New York, 1942.

Hutson, Martha Young. George Henry Durrie (1820-1863): American Winter Landscapist. Orefield, Pennsylvania, 1977.

Lee, Cuthbert. Early American Portrait Painters: The Fourteen Principal Earliest Native-Bent Painters. New Haven, 1929.

Van Why, Joseph S. Nook Farm. Hartford, 1975.

Williams, Stanley Thomas. The Literature of Connecticut. Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut, Committee on Historic Publications. New Haven, 1936.

* Entry under revision.