Museum accessions.(Florence Griswold Museum)(Brief Article)

The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company has operated in Connecticut for 135 years. Nearly twenty years ago, recognizing the important role its home state had long played in American art, the firm began collecting paintings, sculptures, and works on paper executed by artists who lived or worked in Connecticut. That collection has recently been donated to the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, which itself was the locus of one of the best-known art colonies of the end of the nineteenth century. A more auspicious confluence is hard to imagine. The paintings are to be installed in a new building at the museum next spring.

Both before and for many years after the American Revolution, Connecticut was home to a population proud of its restrained tastes, pious ideals and republican values. As the eighteenth century wound to a close prosperity was on the rise--farms flourished, towns and cities grew, and cultural amenities began to spread. Ralph Earl a Massachusetts-born and London-trained painter who had been imprisoned in New York City for debt in the late 1780s, found an increasingly affluent Connecticut society a way to salvage his reputation and regain his financial stability. He went to Fair field County in 1788 and for the next decade painted the leaders of Connecticut society, devising a style that perfectly fitted their image of themselves and the spirit of their age. Typical is the earliest painting in the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection, which depicts Elizabeth Harris Richards (illustrated below). In it Earl shows evidence of his English training--such as the red drapery and the beautifully rendered dress fabric--temper ed by the proud, conservative nature of his sitter who, solidly set in the space, gazes directly at the viewer her visage showing little hint of flattery in its painting. Also typical of Earl's work is the sense of place established by the view through the window, depicting the coastal ...