Rare Light by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2016-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

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EASTERN CONNECTICUT LANDSCAPES AND THE ENVIRONMENT, 1882–1919

THE PASTORAL AS MIDDLE GROUND

Jamie H. Eves

The painter Julian Alden Weir was intimately familiar with five distinct environments during his lifetime: the rural environment of the Hudson River Valley of his youth in the 1850s and 1860s; the urban environment of New York City, where he lived and worked off and on from the 1870s until his death in 1919; the mixed urban-and-rural environment of Paris, France, and its environs, where he studied in the 1870s; the near wilderness of the Adirondack country in upstate New York, where he considered locating in the 1880s; and the mixed rural-and-small-town environment of Windham, Greenwich, and Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he painted and lived during many of the same years that he was also in New York City. Placed on a continuum from most wild to most artificial, the Adirondacks existed on one extreme, while New York City and Paris perched on the other. Rural Connecticut, the Hudson Valley, and the countryside around Paris were middle ground, seemingly pastoral environments that combined small mill-towns, agricultural villages, and the patchwork farmland of nineteenth-century market agriculture. It was this middle landscape, this deliberate combination of nature and artifice, that Weir — and many other turn-of-the-century Americans — considered ideal. This essay examines the environment of northeast Connecticut when Weir lived in Windham, along with a growing movement for pastoral preservation in Connecticut that originated at the same time, and which reverberated in many of Weir’s paintings.

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