In the Connecticut Hills

Vonnoh spent many summers at the artist colonies in Old Lyme and Cos Cob, Connecticut. He may have made this view of a hazy day in the forested Connecticut hills, with its moody purples, during one of those summer sojourns. There, as in New Hope, Pennsylvania, the unspoiled landscape inspired concentrations of like-minded, forward-looking artists. Vonnoh also traveled frequently to France and joined the international colony of artists at Grez-sur-Loing. 

Vonnoh is counted among the first American proponents of French Impressionism. Having trained as a young artist in Boston at the Massachusetts Normal Art Club (now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design), he traveled to Paris in 1880 and continued his studies at the Académie Julian. Impressionism was not yet a decade old, but it captivated Vonnoh and he became a lifelong advocate for direct, outdoor painting and loose, suggestive brushwork of unmixed colors. In 1891, he was recruited to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; many of the artists whose work is on view in this gallery, including Walter Elmer Schofield and William Glackens, were his students.  

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