#Connecticut festival of living art portable

“The object of study and sketching out of doors is to fill the memory with facts,” remarked Tonalist Bruce Crane. For the Tonalist, it was primarily the gathering of visual information in a sketchbook or on an oil sketch.

For the Impressionist, it could yield a finished canvas, or one nearly so to be completed in the studio. The objectives of outdoor sketching varied from artist to artist.

#Connecticut festival of living art portable

Using portable easels, and perhaps a canvas stool and sun umbrella, they painted under endlessly varying conditions and endured the distractions of both mosquitoes and curious onlookers. Often outfitted in country tweeds, knickers, and backpacks, the Old Lyme artists carried paint boxes filled with brushes, palettes, tubes of paint, and small canvas boards out into the open countryside to paint directly from nature. Before then, oil pigments were stored in fragile glass syringes or pouches made from pig bladders and were used principally in the studio. This technological advance would transform the practice of painting in this country. The invention of collapsible metal tubes in the 1840s allowed for long-term storage of oil paints, making extended outdoor painting possible. Outdoor sketching was a nearly universal working method for the artists of the Lyme Art Colony. As Ranger put it, “I would like to get into my pictures of this region a little of the love I feel for those who made it.”

A lingering romanticism can be found in their poetic depictions of New England rural life. Old Lyme’s landscape, worked by generations of farmers, stirred deep feelings in the minds of these painters and, not coincidentally, their patrons. Like Corot and Rousseau before them, these artists of Lyme sought to attain a synthesis of realism, based upon what they saw, with a subjective interpretation of nature, based upon what they felt. The earlier Barbizon tradition, in both its French and Dutch manifestations, was a powerful legacy. As a style, Tonalism flourished in America from the 1880s to the early 1900s and is characterized by the use of harmonious colors and delicate effects of light to create vague, suggestive moods. United by their shared interest in painting rural life with great sensitivity and personal feeling, these artists were identified as Tonalists. Calling themselves the “School of Lyme,” the first artists who came at the urging of the colony’s founder, Henry Ward Ranger, believed they were forming a new school of painting in America. “The school of Lyme is a group of painters brought together over the idea of tonality.” – Artist Henry Rankin Poore, 1903įrom its beginnings, the Lyme Art Colony was shaped by a strong group identity. Henry Ward Ranger and His Tonalist Circle