Given its location in southern Connecticut, it’s appropriate that the Fairfield University Art Museum has organized the exhibition “Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut.” It explores the development of the tonalist style in American landscape painting from the 1870s — a movement that reacted against the Hudson River School’s narrative of God-ordained grandeur and luminous, crystalline views by instead foregrounding humanity’s spiritual connection to nature, often painted from memory and informed by the traumas of civil war and industrialization.
At a Glance:
“Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut”
Fairfield University Art Museum
Fairfield, Connecticut
fairfield.edu/museum
Through April 12, 2025
Drawn from private and public collections, the show’s 70 works range in date from 1878 to 1917, painted by 24 artists clustered primarily in and around New York and Boston. The title (Dawn & Dusk) reflects the tonalists’ preference for the subtle visual effects that dawn, twilight, autumn, and winter have on the landscape. Vacant of human activity, the images often hint at spiritual or symbolic meanings and provide a bridge to the more expressive and psychological modernist works of the 20th century.
Guest-curated by Mary Ann Hollihan, the exhibition features an important painting by George Inness from the Bridgeport Public Library not publicly exhibited in over 70 years; two works by Whistler lent by the New York Public Library; two paintings lent by the Florence Griswold Museum (Old Lyme, Connecticut); and works by three women artists lent by New York City’s Hawthorne Fine Art and the Cooley Gallery (Old Lyme).
