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Fairfield University Art Museum

Fairfield University 
DigitalCommons@Fairfield 
Ephemera Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut 
Spring 2025 
Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut - Wall Labels 6x7 
Fairfield University Art Museum 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/tonalism-ephemera 
Recommended Citation 
Fairfield University Art Museum, "Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut - Wall Labels 6x7" (2025). 
Ephemera. 6. 
https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/tonalism-ephemera/6 
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permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses, you need to obtain 
permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license 
in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@fairfield.edu. 
John Francis Murphy (American, 1853-1921) 
Sleepy Hollow, 1885 
Oil on canvas 
Private collection, Connecticut
Born in Oswego, New York, John Francis Murphy 
briefly attended the Chicago Academy of Design 
but was largely self-taught. In 1873, he discovered 
the beauty of the Keene Valley in the Adirondack 
Mountains of New York and was taken with the 
descriptive scenic paintings of the Hudson River 
School artists. Up to 1885, under the influence 
of the Hudson River School painters, Murphy 
developed a habit of drawing intensely detailed 
nature studies in pencil. From 1886 to 1900, 
Murphy traveled to London and Amsterdam, 
then sojourned in Montigny-sur-Loing, France, 
painting Corot’s home, Ville-d’Avray, and 
absorbing the ideas of the Barbizon painters. The 
loosening brushwork of Sleepy Hollow of 1885 
marks Murphy’s move toward the moodier tonal 
style of this second period. 
Robert Bruce Crane (American, 1857-1937) 
Sunset, ca. 1890 
Oil on canvas 
Private collection, Connecticut
Bruce Crane attended the Art Students League 
between 1878 and 1882, painting in and around 
the New York area – New Jersey, Long Island, and 
the Adirondacks – in the tonalist mode favored by 
Alexander Wyant, who remained his close friend 
until Wyant’s death in 1892. In 1882, Crane made 
the obligatory trip abroad to the artist colony at 
Grez-sur-Loing, near the village of Barbizon at the 
edge of the Fontainebleau forest in France. Crane 
absorbed an idea taught by one of the leaders of 
the Barbizon School, Jean-Charles Cazin (1841-
1901), that an artist should draw upon recollection 
and imagination rather than make precise 
sketches. His Sunset of about 1890 is fully within 
the realm of tonalism, the dreamlike marsh view 
bathed in the ambers and golds of an autumn 
sunset.
Charles Warren Eaton (American, 1857-1937) 
Winter Solitude, 1887 
Oil on canvas 
Private collection, Connecticut
Eaton traveled to Europe in 1886 and visited the 
artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing near the village 
of Barbizon, where he absorbed the Barbizon 
painters’ focus on the informal and intimate 
aspects of the French landscape. Upon his return 
to New York, Eaton followed the fashion for 
rendering views of twilight, dusk, and night that 
swept the New York art world in concert with 
the Whistler exhibition “Notes”—“Harmonies”—
“Nocturnes” at the H. Wunderlich gallery. Eaton’s 
Winter Solitude, an exquisite rendering of the sun 
setting at the end of a cold winter day, executed in 
creamy grays and chalky whites, suggests deeper 
reflection upon the passage of time and one’s own 
limited existence. 
Charles Warren Eaton (American, 1857-1937) 
Connecticut Pines, ca. 1903 
Oil on canvas 
Private collection, Connecticut
The paintings of pine trees that became signatory 
of Eaton’s work such as Connecticut Pines are 
reflective of Thoreau’s dismay at the destruction of 
American woodland due to extensive lumbering 
of white pine for use as ship masts. Few stands 
of towering white pines stood in Eaton’s era, and 
one gets the sense that he was trying to preserve, 
honor, and recover the majesty of these trees. 
His pine tree paintings embody the essence of 
tonalism, reverential and contemplative, and 
particularly American in recalling the continent’s 
ancient forests. These symbols of a lost world are 
made more poignant in Eaton’s paintings by the 
patterning, asymmetry, and flatness reminiscent 
of Japanese art that so many tonalist artists 
embraced.
Benjamin Foster (American, 1852-1926) 
Housatonic Twilight, ca. 1910  
Oil on canvas 
Private collection, New York
Aside from the formal coloristic aspects of 
tonalism, the notion that one achieved spiritual 
nourishment from the underlying attachment 
to the landscape of one’s home and homeland 
through the contemplation of nature was an 
Emersonian/Transcendentalist philosophy. 
Painting the hills and valleys around his 
Cornwall Hollow home, Ben Foster developed 
imagery for this psychological endeavor. The 
viewpoint from which Foster painted his vistas 
of the Connecticut hills is unsettling, slightly off-
putting, and compressed by the nearly square 
format he favored, features that command a closer 
look. Housatonic Twilight is a richly painted view 
that careens beyond the curve of the river.
Benjamin Foster (American, 1852-1926) 
West Cornwall Hills, ca. 1910 
Oil on canvas 
Private collection, New York 
Eschewing the tranquility of a horizontal 
composition, Foster chose a more active 
patterning of diagonals, the foreground in his 
paintings often dipping into the middle space. 
Housatonic Twilight is a composition of diagonals 
as is West Cornwall Hills, the landscape of rolling 
hills sliding into one another so typical of the 
Connecticut landscape in this area and no doubt 
the inspiration for this format. The colors of 
the rock-strewn foreground are repeated in a 
settlement on a distant hillside; far from being 
a comfortable view into an inviting landscape, 
this painting catapults the viewer into an 
undefined space. Despite the traditional imagery 
of landscape, Foster’s paintings are forward-
thinking in composition and intent. 
Mina Fonda Ochtman (American, 1862-1924) 
A Bright Winter Day, ca. 1900 
Watercolor on paper 
Hawthorne Fine Art, LLC and Cooley Gallery
Born in New Hampshire, Mina Fonda made 
her way to New York in 1886. She studied with 
Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) at the Art Students 
League, where her future husband, Leonard 
Ochtman, had also been a student. In 1891, the 
Ochtmans settled in Cos Cob, Connecticut, 
and she participated in the artists’ colony that 
ultimately formed there, producing sensitive 
and poetic watercolors, a medium favored 
for representing the translucent effects of 
spring-blooming trees and winter snow. Her 
sensitive, ethereal watercolor A Bright Winter 
Day is no doubt an image of the area around her 
Connecticut home. 


English

Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut - Wall Labels 6x7

https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/tonalism-ephemera/1008/thumbnail.jp

Fairfield University 
DigitalCommons@Fairfield 
Ephemera Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut 
Spring 2025 
Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut - Wall Labels 6x11 
Fairfield University Art Museum 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/tonalism-ephemera 
Recommended Citation 
Fairfield University Art Museum, "Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut - Wall Labels 6x11" (2025). 
Ephemera. 9. 
https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/tonalism-ephemera/9 
This item has been accepted for inclusion in DigitalCommons@Fairfield by an authorized administrator of 
DigitalCommons@Fairfield. It is brought to you by DigitalCommons@Fairfield with permission from the rights-
holder(s) and is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this item in any way that is 
permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses, you need to obtain 
permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license 
in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@fairfield.edu. 
George Inness (American, 1825-1894) 
Durham, Connecticut, 1879 
Oil on wood panel 
The Milton Klein Collection, Bridgeport Public 
Library, Bridgeport, Connecticut
George Inness was a towering figure in the New 
York art world of the late nineteenth century. 
In an 1878 interview in Harper’s New Monthly 
Magazine, titled “A Painter on Painting,” Inness 
famously stated his views that the purpose of 
art was not to copy the image of a place but to 
generate an emotional response in the viewer: 
A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. 
It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim 
is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken 
an emotion. This emotion may be one of love, 
of pity, of veneration, of hate, of pleasure, or 
of pain; but it must be a single emotion, if the 
work has unity, … and the true beauty of the 
work consists in the beauty of the sentiment 
or emotion which it inspires. … Details in the 
picture must be elaborated only enough fully 
to reproduce the impression that the artist 
wishes to reproduce.
Typical of Inness’s work in the late 1870s is 
Durham, Connecticut, a peaceful landscape with 
a grouping of trees in the foreground anchoring 
a broadly painted view of a meadow. The foliage 
of the trees and the receding meadows dissolve 
into bands and patches of color. Inness’s indistinct 
brushwork suggests the haze of an early summer 
evening, his limited range of darker and paler 
greens resulting in a pattern of vibrating tonality.
John Henry Twachtman (American, 1853-1902)  
San Miniato, 1880 
Oil on canvas 
Private collection, New York
John Henry Twachtman was born of German 
parentage in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied at 
the McMicken School of Design in that city in 
1871. He soon made his way to Munich, where 
he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. 
In 1878, back in New York, Twachtman showed 
at the first exhibition of the Society of American 
Artists and met Julian Alden Weir, who would 
become a lifelong friend, always addressed as 
“Weir.”
In 1879, Twachtman received a letter from 
Duveneck offering him “inducements” to travel 
to Florence, Italy, “where he has sort of a private 
school and in which I am to teach.” Twachtman’s 
1880 painting of San Miniato, an image done 
during his stay in Florence, is reflective of the 
turbulent brushwork and tenebrous palette 
favored by Munich-trained artists. San Miniato 
contains only the barest notations of the buildings 
and landscape, the overall deep grayish-green 
tones thickly rendered. It is a surprisingly somber 
image, perhaps an evening view, of a town in 
what is otherwise considered sunny Italy. In 
this early work, Twachtman is pushing toward 
the abstraction and emotionalism of modernism 
that aimed to reveal the artist’s individualized 
reaction to and perception of what he was seeing, 
a state of mind seminal to the tonalist movement.


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Installation image of the exhibition An Gorta Mor: Selections from Ireland\u27s Great Hunger Museum

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Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut - Wall Labels 6x7

Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut - Wall Labels 6x11

Installation image of the exhibition Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut

Installation image of the exhibition Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut

Installation image of the exhibition Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut

Installation image of the exhibition Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut

Installation image of the exhibition Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut

Installation image of the exhibition Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut

Installation image of the exhibition An Gorta Mor: Selections from Ireland\u27s Great Hunger Museum

Installation image of the exhibition An Gorta Mor: Selections from Ireland\u27s Great Hunger Museum

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