| American Paintings — George Henry Durrie - View of East Rock, New Haven |
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George Henry Durrie - View of East Rock, New Haven |
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Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 20 1/4 x 25 1/4 inches George Henry Durrie was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1820. Along with his older brother John, he studied sporadically from 1839 to 1841 with the portrait painter Nathaniel Jocelyn. Between 1840 to 1842 he became an itinerant painter in Connecticut and New Jersey, expanding his repetoire to include still life, genre and Shakespearean scenes. He finally settled in New Haven, Connecticut where he spent the remainder of his life. Durrie produced roughly 300 paintings, of which the earliest were portraits; by the mid-1840s he had begun to paint landscape and rural genre scenes of New England and these are considered to be his finest achievement. His landscapes are characterized by the use of pale though cheerful colors and by the repeated use of certain motifs: an isolated farmhouse, a road placed diagonally leading the eye into the composition, and a hill in the distance. By the late 1850s Durrie's reputation had started to grow, and he was exhibiting at prestigious institutions, such as the National Academy of Design. In 1861 Currier & Ives helped popularize his work by publishing hand-colored lithographs of two of his winter landscapes, New England Winter Scene and the Farmyard in Winter. Two more were published in 1863 and a further six after his death that same year. The hill, rising some four hundred feet, is easily visible from many parts of New Haven as well as from surrounding towns thus making it a prominent landmark of the area. As such, it is fitting that East Rock should be so gloriously rendered by one of New Haven’s most prominent and well-respected nineteenth-century artists. |
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