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Despite being known as the “American Giverny,” the calling card of Old Lyme, Connecticut’s artist colony was not the sun-dappled scenes typical of French Impressionism but rather the ethereal glow of the moon scattered over the New England landscape. Among the Old Lyme residents, these nighttime scenes were referred to as “rainy day paintings” — when the weather was rotten (a not infrequent occurrence in the Northeast) and plein air work out of the question, the artists would retreat to their studios and their minds, conjuring nocturnes out of feelings and memories of the woods and waters of the coastal town. Robert Vonnoh first visited Old Lyme in 1905, becoming a more regular presence alongside his wife and fellow artist Bessie Potter Vonnoh (1872-1955) in the 1910s. While the colony’s earlier days were heavily influenced by the Tonalism of Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916), after the 1903 arrival of Childe Hassam (1859-1945), Impressionism gained a more significant foothold, strengthened even further by Vonnoh’s presence and the techniques he’d gleaned in Paris and the village of Grez-sur-Loing under the influence of artists like Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Irish Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940). The hazy mood of Moonlit Evening holds inflections of Old Lyme’s Tonalist beginnings — Vonnoh’s delicate glazes melting the forms of the forest at night — while the substantial swaths of periwinkle, lavender, and pale green push the work into a territory that verges on abstraction. This mature, experimental work by Vonnoh blends aspects of his inner world with the external specificity of Old Lyme’s climate and atmosphere. Situated at the estuarial convergence of the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound, the town often found itself shrouded in fog, especially in the tentative early days of spring. In Moonlit Evening, Vonnoh holds both the formless mystery and weighted actuality of vapor condensing around salt in a precise balance, tossing moonbeams across the dreamlike scene. It’s the light of Lyme, the light of Grez, and the light only Vonnoh could bring from within himself, all reflecting and refracting off of one another, a vision breathing at the precipice of dissolution, waiting for the sun to burn it away.
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