Dwight William Tryon

Dwight William Tryon (1849-1925)

(“A Hartford Biography”)

© Gary W. Knoble, 2014

Hartford born Dwight William Tryon was one of the most successful and widely known painters of “The Hartford Art Colony”. His landscapes were favored by Charles Freer, which brought him national fame. During his almost 40 years as a teacher at Smith College, he influenced the artistic tastes of two generations of Smith students.

He was born in Hartford on August 13, 1849. His father was Anson Tryon, a native of Glastonbury Connecticut. His paternal ancestors were from a section of South Glastonbury known as Tryontown. His mother was Delia Roberts from East Hartford. His father was a builder/contractor. In 1852, when Tryon was just 2, his father was accidently shot and killed by his own brother in a hunting accident. After the accident Delia and her infant son moved to a poor part of East Hartford to live with her family.

He went to high school in East Hartford. After his graduation in 1863, at age 14, he and his mother moved to Hartford. Too young to fight in the Civil War, he found a job in the Colt firearms factory making precision machine tools. By this time he was already producing skilled drawings, some of which are still preserved.

About a year later he found a job more to his liking as a bookkeeper with the Brown Gross bookstore, then at the corner of Main St. and Asylum Ave. In 1869, the bookstore shortly moved just down the street on Asylum Ave. Tryon and one of his fellow workers moved the entire stock of the bookstore to the new location by wheelbarrow. He covered the walls in the basement of the bookstore with his drawings of boats. At this time he took frequent excursions by rowboat on the Connecticut River to draw the river scenery. He found the local landscape flat and uninteresting. He preferred the water and the shore.

His mother worked as a custodian at the Morgan Museum, now the Wadsworth Atheneum, just down the block on Main Street. He took full advantage of the bookstore and the museum to learn as much as he could about culture and art, often visiting his mother after hours to study the paintings in the museum. A boyhood friend remembered that Tryon studied at the Hannum’s Business School, where he was well known for adeptness for “pen and ink”.

In 1870, Hartford had a thriving art scene, with more than 20 professional painters, painting and exhibiting their works in the city. The painters’ studios were clustered around the area on Main Street between the Museum, where his mother worked, and Asylum Ave. where he worked. There were many artist studios in the insurance company buildings and many art supply stores that also functioned as galleries for the local artists. Beginning in 1871 the Hartford Art Association, which incorporated in 1872 as the Connecticut School of Design, began sponsoring annual shows. Tryon was the first Secretary of the school and the youngest of the founding members. The other founding members included the prominent Hartford artists, John W. Stancliff, Frederick Stiles Jewett, George F. Wright, William Ruthven Wheeler, and Roswell Morse Shurtleff. Charles Noel Flagg joined sometime before 1873. The school lasted only a few years but provided a foundation for the Society of Decorative Arts, (which later became the Hartford Art School) and Flagg’s Connecticut Art Students League.

In 1870, Tryon also sold his first painting to another young Hartford painter William Bailey Faxon who was the same age as Tryon. The painting was a small 6”x 8” Venetian marine that Faxon had seen in the window of the bookstore. The price was $15 but Faxon said he had only $10 and Tryon agreed. They remained life long friends, both studying in Paris at the same time and eventually occupying neighboring New York studios.

Through his work in the bookstore he became acquainted with many of the prominent figures of Hartford. Otis Skinner, the well-known actor, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the leading clergy of Hartford, Rev. Horace Bushnell, Edwin P. Parker and Rev. Joseph Twitchell were among the young man’s friends. Tryon enjoyed billiards and Twain invited him to play in his remarkable billiards room at the top of his house on Farmington Avenue.

In 1873, Tryon married Alice H. Belden and the same year decided to leave the world of business to pursue a career in art. He took a studio on the top floor of the Connecticut Mutual Insurance Company at the corner of Main and Pearl Streets. William Ruthven Wheeler was among the artist with studios in the same building. His decision to pursue an artistic career without any outside financial support was not a casual one at the time. Twain and Twitchell argued strongly against such a move, although he was supported by Bushnell. Twain said, “Tryon, you are making the mistake of your life……you will probably starve to death in a garret.” Henry Cooke White, in his biography of Tryon draws a vivid picture of his courage in the face of the climate at the time in staid, conservative Hartford.

“Tryon’s decision to give up business and launch his barque upon the adventurous sea of art seems natural enough to us now, as we view it in the light of subsequent events. We must, however, recall something of the general attitude of mind of New England people of that day toward art and artists to realize what a momentous thing is was for a young man to do. Artists, like actors, were looked at a little askance, and, with the possible exception of the portrait painter, were not considered indispensable to the welfare of any well-regulated community. Painting pictures was hardly one of the useful occupations and certainly not a gainful one. And if a literary personage like Mark Twain disapproved of young Tryon’s adventure, what must more staid and practical people have thought of it? Probably as visionary, and also a little déclassé in it’s assumed Bohemian aspects. But most certainly as frivolous. ‘Let joy be unconfined’ was not the motto of our New England ancestors.” (White page 28-29)

However Tryon quickly began to gather a following. The Cheney’s of Manchester were among his patrons, not only buying his paintings, but also taking classes in art from him. Bushnell, as previously mentioned was also supportive.

In 1875, Henry C. White, then 14, first visited his studio in the Connecticut Mutual Insurance Company building and provides a vivid recollection of it in his biography of Tryon.

“In the tower of the southeast corner of the building, since rebuilt, was the studio of Tryon. A couple of lads whose father was employed in the building were schoolboy friends of mine, and on Saturdays I used to go there with them. We played about the buildings and enjoyed the fine view of the city, the river, and East Hartford to be seen from a large window on the top floor. I loved nature and had already begun to draw and paint. One memorable day the door of Tryon’s studio stood afar, and I caught a glimpse of pictures which drew me like a magnet. I ventured nearer, and a voice said, “Come in”. I needed no second invitation and we were soon engaged in an interesting conversation during which I managed to tell him of my great desire to learn to draw and paint. He assured me that, if my parents were willing, he would be glad to help me. For the remainder of that winter in worked in his studio every Saturday, and when summer came he invited me to accompany him to Block Island on a sketching trip.” (White, page 31)

White remained a life long friend and in 1930 published his biography.

In 1876, Tryon and his wife decided to join several other young Hartford painters in Paris. Charles and Montague Flagg, Robert Brandegee, and William Faxon had moved there in 1872 and were studying with Jacquesson del la Chevreuse. He gathered up all of his paintings, conducted a “fire sale” and departed for Paris with the grand sum of $2,000.

He remained in Paris for five years until 1881. He and his wife were obviously good money managers to make $2,000 last this long. Upon his return, he set up a studio in the Rembrandt Building on West 57th St. with Faxon as his neighbor. He began showing his work at the Montross Gallery. He also chose South Dartmouth, Mass. as his summer place. In 1886 he built his house in South Dartmouth that remained his summer residence for the rest of his life.

In 1885 he began his long teaching career at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He taught there until his retirement in1923. In the same year he replaced James Wells Champney, a fellow teacher at Smith, as principal instructor of Society of Decorative Arts that had been renamed the Art Society of Hartford, (later named the Hartford Art School and eventually became The Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford), and relocated to the Wadsworth Atheneum which had been previously closed to the public for lack of patronage. Hildegard Cummings credits Tryon for attracting the other members of “The Parisian branch of the Hartford art colony” back to Hartford. This included Charles Noel Flagg, who returned to Hartford in 1887, Montague Flagg, Faxon, and Brandegee, (who was teaching at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington).

He met Charles Freer in 1889. Freer became an avid collector of his works giving him financial security. There is an extensive collection of most of his best works at the Freer Gallery, although contrary to Freer’s wishes, many of them are seldom exhibited.

James Britton, a student of Flagg and an inveterate diarist, provides a wonderful verbal picture of Tryon in his apartment and studio in Harperly Hall on Central Park West in 1923, just two years before his death.

Wednesday 4 Feb (1925)

“Call at noon on Dwight Tryon Harperly Hall Central Park West (64th St.). Find the building a large interesting one and Tryon’s apartment large full of light and very pleasant and home like, enormous reception room or living room into which smiling Mrs. Tryon ushers me has large windows looking down onto Central Park now full of snow a great sight on this beautiful sunny day. Mrs. Tryon a jolly round smiling white haired old lady but very vigorous apparently yet gentle and modest. Says ‘Mr. Tryon is just having a bite of lunch and will be in directly’. Soon Tryon comes walking very slowly a thin wiry dark man in very loose simple clothes. Places chairs for us and sits down quite precisely. I begin to talk of Brandegee and soon I find Tryon very alert and sprightly in conversation but very serious and considered. His 76 years he holds well. His face is tanned and his black eyes are full of sparkle and intensity. He says in the finest Yankee drawl, ‘yes yes of course Brandegee was a very fine painter but he was lazy. He was lazy. I knew him for many years knew him in Paris. He was lazy. If he had not been he would have painted a number of pictures as good as that portrait of Montague Flagg that I bought for Smith College. That is a great one. But he didn’t often carry them out as well as he did that one. I knew him when he was a young fellow in Hartford. He had a studio in one of the Insurance buildings. Charlie Flagg brought me to see him. Then later we were in the fine school of Jacquesson’s in Paris.’ I tell Tryon that of his own work one picture in particular has always remained in my mind though I’ve never seen the original only a print I describe the Spring in New England and he says, ‘ yes oh yes why that is the one I painted for Freer one of a number as decoration for his home. It is a very large picture very large but somehow I don’t paint large pictures any more. I can concentrate and intensify on a smaller scale.’ He gets up and shows me a book on his work by Caffin and asks me if the frontspiece is not the picture I refer to. Then he tells about Freer who bought a number of his things Whistlers and Thayers for his museum now being erecting in Washington as his bequest to the nation. Freer offered also to publish a list of his picture if Tryon would make one out so it was printed in the Caffin book. After a while Tryon invites me into his studio an adjoining not so large a room as the sitting room, but has some fine tapestries in it. Tryon moves about very sprightly and quietly as he gets small pictures out of a closed cabinet and places them so I can see them all the time we talk about Brandegee Charlie Foster and Henry White. Tryon says White has bought another of his pictures within a few days. He speaks of White quite frankly as a pupil and as an imitator of his work. I believe what he said was that ‘It perhaps is quite natural that he should imitate my work’. But this is said seriously and with an evident conviction expressing a judgment. As I talk with him Tryon grows quite enthusiastic. Agrees with me that Howard (?)Martin was finer than I was. I mention Vonnoh as a Hartford painter as we all are and ask Tryon if he thinks well of his work. ‘No’ he says, ‘I’ve never seen anything of Vonnoh’s that impressed me. He doesn’t see to have individuality’. I mention Eakins Clinic ‘Yes that is a fine one but somehow Eakins seems cold to me’. I speak of Alden Weir and Tryon says, ‘What you say of Weir is perfectly true. He had extreme delicacy but he lacked vigor’. I find Tryon very interesting a real New Englander. He likes my paper (an art magazine Britton was publishing) and when I mention his contribution to it he goes into another room without a word and returns with two 20 dollar notes new crisp ones bound with a rubber band and hands them to me with a most courteous and dignified gesture nodding his head slightly. The man has an impressive air I am not surprised he has grown rich selling his pictures he surrounds his work with an atmosphere that seriously gives it value.. He’s done some good ones.” (volume 1 page 11)

Dwight Tryon died on July 1, 1925 in South Dartmouth of stomach cancer

He left his extensive collection of paintings to Smith College. Upon his death a gallery was being constructed at Smith to house the paintings. Unfortunately this gallery was demolished in 1971.

Henry White provides a fitting epitaph, “No wonder he could paint New England, he was New England”.

Britton, James, “Diaries, in James Britton Papers”, Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Cleveland, David A., “A History of Amerian Tonalism: 1880-1920” , 2010

Cummings, Hildegard, “The Hartford Art Colony 1880-1900”, 1989, The Connecticut Gallery Inc.

Dearinger, David B. (Editor), “Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of The National Academy of Design Volume I, 1826-1925”, 2004

Gerdts, William H., “Art Across America, The East and the Mid-Atlantic” , 1990

Kornhauser, Elizabeth M., “American Paintings Before 1945 in the Wadsworth Atheneum”, 1996, pg. 759-760

Rovetti, Paul F., Nelson C. White, “Dwight W. Tryon A Retrospective Exhibition”, Museum of Art, The University of Connecticut 1971

White, Henry C., “The Life and Art of Dwight William Tryon”, 1930