George Henry Durrie

George Henry Durrie (1820-1863)

Best known as a painter of New England winter scenery, George Durrie was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to John Durrie and Clarissa Clark. His father was from Hartford, and was a descendent of John Steele, a founder of that city; his mother was from nearby West Hartford. The pair moved to New Haven, where John established the firm Durrie and Peck, publishers, booksellers, and stationers.

From about 1839 to 1840 Durrie and his elder brother, John Jr., studied with Nathaniel Jocelyn, a well-known New Haven painter of portraits and miniatures and an engraver of banknotes. George was soon traveling around Connecticut as an itinerant portraitist. His early stops included Hartford, Meriden, Naugatuck, and Bethany, where he met his future wife, Sarah Perkins, the daughter of a client and friend. They married in 1841. Later, he went to Monmouth County, New Jersey, to New York State, and to Petersburg, Virginia.

By October 1842 Durrie had settled in New Haven and was exhibiting at the New Haven Horticultural Society and at the National Academy of Design in New York. After 1845 records indicate that Durrie began to shift his focus from portraits to landscapes. His portraits still sold more quickly than the latter, but he persevered, holding a special sale of winter scenes in his studio in 1854.

In 1857 Durrie moved to New York City and opened a studio but remained there only one year. He exhibited two winter pictures at the National Academy of Design, where he continued to show work for the rest of his life. In the late 1850s Currier and Ives began to publish lithographs after his paintings, which brought his work to the attention of a broad popular audience.

Durrie died in his early forties, after a long bout of illness. His brother John Jr. and his son George completed a number of canvases left unfinished at Durrie's death, creating later attribution problems for scholars.

Winter in New England, 1851

Oil on panel, 19 7/8 x 25 in. (50.5 x 63.5 cm)

Signed and dated (verso, upper right): “G H Durrie / 1851”

Stephen Lawrence Fund (1958.11)

George Durrie was one of only a few nineteenth-century American artists who specialized in winter landscapes. For practical reasons, most landscape painters sketched in spring, summer, and autumn and worked on their compositions in the studio in winter. Because nineteenth-century Americans subscribed to the traditional notion of the seasons as a cycle of growth and decay, and winter was naturally associated with death, it was usually an unpopular subject for artists. (1) Perhaps Durrie was shrewd in taking advantage of the dearth of winter landscapes on the market, but he also found the season aesthetically pleasing. In winter 1844-1845, he wrote in his diary, "The tree sparkling with icy limbs, made the scene almost enchanting . . . . The weather has been rather cold, especially towards night, when it was quite blustering. The ground, trees, etc. were completely covered with ice, which, glittering in the sun, looked beautiful." (2)

One of Durrie's first known winter scenes is Sleighing Party” (whereabouts unknown), exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1845 and, according to Durrie himself, admired by Thomas Cole. (3) His earliest extant winter landscapes date from the early 1850s. “Winter in New England”, dated to about 1852, (4) belongs to this group, which includes “Going Home to Thanksgiving” (whereabouts unknown), and the “Old Grist Mill” (1853; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.). The anthropomorphic bare-limbed trees that appear in all three of these pictures do not recur in his later landscapes. (5) These trees, their broken and twisted branches almost expressive, recall the work of Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School painters, whose interest in anthropomorphism was undoubtedly familiar to Durrie. (6) His palette in “Winter in New England”, featuring cold blues and grays, and his heavy application of white pigment in the foreground icicles results in a successful image of the rawness of a New England winter. This use of impasto was unusual for Durrie, who usually applied paint thinly.

“Winter in New England” displays the influence of Thomas Cole in other ways as well. Typical of Cole's work was an adherence to the compositional method of Claude Lorrain, who often framed a central body of water with trees and buildings. Here, Durrie used the gristmill (a recurring subject in Durrie's oeuvre) and the tree to frame the frozen pond and waterfall.

“Winter in New England” is ultimately a nostalgic depiction of the Northeast, which was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution in the 1840s and 1850s. Water-powered mills were central to the earliest industrial towns, but by 1852 they had been replaced by stationary steam engines, which enabled manufacturers to move their enterprises to the cities. Durrie's depiction of a gristmill in the country alludes to a simpler, perhaps more picturesque, way of life that appealed to his public, who viewed rural America as a healthy antidote to an increasingly urban-centered nation.

AE

Bibliography:

Bartlett Cowdrey, “George Henry Durrie, 1820-1863: Connecticut Painter of American Life”, exhib. cat. (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1947); Robert M. Lunny, “George Henry Durrie's Snow Pieces: A Loan Exhibition”, exhib. cat. (Newark, N.J.: New Jersey Historical Society, 1959); James Thomas Flexner, “That Wilder Image: The Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962; reprint, New York: Dover, 1970), pp. 212-25; Colin Simkin, “An Exhibition of Paintings by Durrie, Connecticut Artist”, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1966); “Landscapes by George Henry Durrie”, exhib. cat. (New London, Conn.: Lyman Allyn Museum, 1968); Martha Young Hutson, “George Henry Durrie (1820-1863), American Winter Landscapist: Renowned through Currier and Ives”, exhib. cat. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Barbara Museum of Art and American Art Review Press, 1977).

Notes:

. Martha Hutson, "The American Winter Landscape, 1830-1870," “American Art Review 2” (January-February 1975): 60-61.

2. Durrie, quoted in Robert M. Lunny, Snow Pieces of George Henry Durrie, exhib. Cat. (Newark, N.J. of New Jersey Historical Society, 1959), unag.

3. Durrie, diary, paraphrased in “That Wilder Image”. Martha Hutson, "The American Winter Landscape, 1830-1870,"

4. Hutson, “George Henry Durrie”, p. 50-51

5. For an interesting study of anthropomorphism in Hudson River school painting, see J. Gray Sweeney, "The Nude of Landscape Painting: Emblematic Personification in the Art of the Hudson River School," “Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3 no.4” (fall 1989): 43-65.

6. Hutson, George Henry Durrie, p. 51