Tonalists and Impressionists in Cos Cob: Unique American Views of the Connecticut Landscape

The scenic Connecticut landscape has been the inspiration for artists for over a century. In a collaborative partnership with the Fairfield University Art Museum and the Bruce Museum, Greenwich Historical Society invites visitors from near and far to experience an exciting perspective on the American artists who shaped early modern American art and their portrayals of the landscapes around them.

A collaborative presentation will take place in the Greenwich Historical Society Permanent Collections Gallery with Mary Anne Hollihan, Curator of the Fairfield University Art Museum’s current exhibition, Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut, and Jordan Hillman, Curatorial Associate at the Bruce Museum and curator of the Nature’s Impressions exhibition. The presentation will conclude with an art colony tour of the National Historic Landmark Bush-Holley House hosted by Kathy Craughwell-Varda, Interim Curator at Greenwich Historical Society.

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Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut

Mary Ann Hollihan, Curator Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut Exhibition at University of Fairfield Art Museum

With the waning interest in the majestic landscapes of the Hudson River School during the late 19^th century, new forms of art were taken up by a generation of artists who had studied in Munich and Paris and carried back to America techniques and ideas that they developed into uniquely American art forms. The intimate landscape views of the French Barbizon painters, together with the exhortations that art must bring about an emotional, not an intellectual response, led to the production of artwork we identify as tonalist.

In 1906, the critic Clara Ruge observed “We have today a national school of landscape painting which is rapidly advancing in importance and originality…A new school is, as it were, a new dialect in the language of painting. The vocabulary must be collected; the techniques must be studied.” Clara Ruge was talking about tonalism and spotlighted in her article the works of Connecticut painters, Leonard Ochtman, Henry Ward Ranger, Robert C. Minor, and Franklin de Haven. Connecticut painters were at the forefront of tonalism, a movement that persisted well into the 1920s.

Nature’s Impressions: Capturing Greenwich in Paint

Jordan Hillman, Curatorial Associate, The Bruce Museum

In an 1892 interview with Art Amateur magazine, Childe Hassam spoke to the essential relationship between art and nature but also between the artist’s eye and mind: “Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. The word ‘impression’ as applied to art . . . really means the only truth because it means going straight to nature for inspiration and not allowing tradition to dictate your brush. . . . The true impressionism is realism.” While Hassam believes that artists should work directly from the landscape, he recognizes that ultimately it is their interpretation of it—their “impression”—that is translated from observed reality to its rendering in paint. Yet Hassam’s use of the term impression suggests more than a subjective, transitory artistic encounter with nature; it conjures a specific, modern style of painting associated, like Hassam, with French Impressionism.

This talk considers the impression that both the landscape of Greenwich and Hassam himself made on artists in late nineteenth-century Connecticut, inspiring those who boarded at the Bush-Holley House to innovate fresh stylistic and thematic approaches to nature. The shared ambitions and modern influences of these artists led to the formation of the Cos Cob art colony and, later, the Greenwich Society of Artists, which helped to redefine Impressionism as an American art form.

Art Colony Tour at Bush-Holley House

Kathy Craughwell-Varda, Interim Curator, Greenwich Historical Society

Tours of the Art Colony rooms of the Bush-Holley House will be provided to program participants. The tour will highlight the impact of the Holley-MacRae family boarding house on the artists and writers who stayed there and why it became the setting for the Cos Cob art colony. Josephine Lyon Holley and her daughter Constant Holley MacRae were skilled managers of the family boarding house which attracted artists, and writers to their charming 18th-century home set along the Mianus River. The picturesque setting and familial environment created by the Holley-MacRae’s provided a location that inspired the creativity of their borders and led to the first impressionist art colony in Connecticut.

During the tour visitors will be shown the locations in and outside the house that inspired the works of Twachtman, Hassam, MacRae, and more and see the artworks they completed in Cos Cob.