The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape
October 2, 2015 through
January 31, 2016
The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape used a digital twist to highlight Connecticut’s role in shaping the history of American landscape painting over the past two centuries. The exhibition borrowed the notion of the online keyword searches and organized 76 artworks into categories that cut across traditional chronology to illuminate the complex ways in which we find meaning in the Connecticut landscape.
The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape marked the completion of an expansive project, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, to contribute over 400 digital images of fine art to a collaborative digital library of over 15,000 drawings, prints, maps, and photographs depicting historic images of Connecticut. Re-launched in 2015 as Connecticut History Illustrated, the virtual library offers a platform for searching across media and institutions to discover cultural treasures. This exhibition drew from collections of ten partner institutions to present some of the most renowned depictions of Connecticut in art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The works on view were from the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, the Florence Griswold Museum, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, the Mattatuck Museum, the Mystic Arts Center, Mystic Seaport, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Slater Memorial Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Frederic E. Church, The Charter Oak at Hartford, c. 1846. Oil on canvas, 24 x 34.25 inches. Florence Griswold Museum
Sybil Huntington May, Haddam, ca. 1758. Connecticut Historical Society
George Henry Durrie, Ithiel Town Truss Bridge, 1853. Mattatuck Museum
Milton Bellin (1913–1997), Oil Tankers (Elm City, New Haven). Watercolor on paper. 15 ¼ x 22 ½ in. Collection of the Slater Memorial Museum
This exhibition was sponsored by The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, The Starr Foundation, the Rudolph and John Dirks Fund of the Community Foundation of Eastern Connecticut, and The George A. & Grace L. Long Foundation. Media sponsor: WSHU Public Radio.
