Connecticut Artists of the 20th Century

Highlights

With its proximity to New York and Boston, its major university fine arts programs and its two turn of the 20^thcentury art colonies (Old Lyme and Cos Cob) Connecticut’s art scene burgeoned throughout the last century. The Slater Museum established early relationships with artist-academics affiliated with Yale, the University of Connecticut, Connecticut College and Hartford Art School. The latter first affiliated with the Wadsworth Atheneum, then with the University of Hartford.

The Norwich Art School was founded in 1890, two years after the Slater Memorial Museum, to make the museum’s collections more useful to the school and the community. The first classes met in the Slater Building, where the cast gallery provided an excellent laboratory for “drawing from the antique”, the term used to describe ancient sculpture. As the art school classes became more popular, it was decided that the art school deserved a building of its own. The Art School director at the time, Ozias Dodge, and his wife, Hannah, called on Colonel Charles Converse, a wealthy manufacturer with a strong interest in art and the Academy. His donation made the Converse Art Building, and regularly changing temporary exhibitions, a reality.

The Art School’s first director was Irene Weir, a member of the American artistic dynasty that included Julian Alden Weir. Ms. Weir was followed by a succession of remarkable artist-scholars who made the Academy’s Norwich Art School into the equivalent of a junior college for art majors.