Frederic Edwin Church, Winter Scene in Hartford

This early Church painting depicts a dammed-up rural stream, the water surface partly frozen, the barrier wreathed with ice, the atmospheric whole hovered by bright—presumably afternoon—sun. Church’s extant Hartford-area sketches from 1844 to 1846 include glimpses of the Connecticut River and local freshets, for example Scene near Hartford (September 1846, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, Olana State Historic Site, Taconic Region). The principal such rivulet, variously called the Mill River, Hog River, and Park River, was in 1832-33 spanned by single-arch bridge on Main Street a short distance from the city center. Church documented the waterway’s artifactually and arboreally crowded ambience via a detailed albeit unfinished drawing (The Stone Bridge, Hartford, circa July-September 1846, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, Olana State Historic Site, Taconic Region). An engineering marvel for its day, the Stone Bridge still stands, although the other features shown in Church’s drawing are long since removed.

A red-and-brown frocked child at lower left looks toward the waterway and paired russet buildings. The figure recalls that in Church’s Twilight Among the Mountains, circa 1845, at Olana since the 1880s. Identified by Dr. David C. Huntington as the work exhibited by Church at the National Academy of Design in 1845, that painting dates to when Church was eighteen years old and the Cole-esque Catskill composition shows the young artist’s own style in formation. The present, more broadly brushed scene likely dates slightly later circa 1846 to 1847. Hartford and Catskill, including Cole’s youthful son Theodore (Theddy), was what Church knew, artistically, when he was starting out. Hence that’s what he painted early on, as in the present work.

This winter scene from Church’s early career can also be seen to anticipate works, such as Winter Scene (1872, The Hekscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York), which Church painted at his newly or nearly inhabitable home of Olana, not yet named that, in the 1870s. Depicting another beloved landscape under winter’s snow, in those later works Church revived the mid-late 1840s boyhood-will-be-boyhood mood of the present work.

Church was best known as a landscape painter, and was one of many who belonged to the Hudson River school. The members of this 19th-century art movement had been influenced by romanticism and expressed this through their works. 

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