Henry Ward Ranger - an American tonalist - landscape painter

The American landscape painter Henry Ward Ranger discovered the bucolic Connecticut town of Old Lyme one hundred years ago. Good news always spreads quickly, and soon it became a summertime mecca for a wide range of American artists. To celebrate the centennial of the founding of what came to be known as the Lyme Art Colony, the Florence Griswold Museum has mounted the first significant retrospective exhibition of Ranger's work since 1918. More than thirty works are on view, comprising oils, sketchbooks, watercolors, and archival photographs. The show is entitled Henry Ward Ranger and the Humanized Landscape and remains on view until September 5.

Ranger was raised in Geneseo and Syracuse, New York, where his father, Ward, was an award-winning photographer. In 1873 Henry enrolled in the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University, where his father was a professor of both photography and drawing. Rangers formal education ended after two years when he left school to work as a retoucher in his father's studio. During much of the 1880s he executed watercolors of Canadian and European marine subjects, which he exhibited in New York City, Boston, and Paris to generally favorable reviews. The Barbizon painters interested him greatly until he encountered The Hague school of painters, many of whom worked in rural Laren, which attracted a large colony of American and Dutch painters.

The 1890s marked a turning point in Ranger's career as he came to prefer oils to watercolors. This change may have been influenced by an offer in 1892 from Knoedler Galleries in New York City to give him a one-man exhibition. Many of his works of this period are forest interiors and studies of trees.

In the summer of 1899 Ranger discovered Florence Griswold's boardinghouse in Old Lyme, to which he returned frequently. He eventually became the informal leader of the colony, which, by 1903, had swelled to a collegial group of as many as three dozen artists. Like many of his artist friends, Ranger maintained a studio in New York City, where he was a prominent member of the artistic community, frequently writing and lecturing about art. He was never a plein air artist, preferring instead to make sketches out-of-doors that he subsequently worked up into finished paintings in the studio. He frequently exhibited his sketches and studies alongside his finished canvases.

Ranger's working method separated him from the impressionist artists who, starting with Frederick Childe Hassam, began to visit Old Lynne in 1903. Ranger never became an impressionist, but he did lighten his palette considerably in his later years. Also in 1903 Ranger and a group of other artists (including Hassam) moved into a cooperative apartment building with artists' studios on West Sixty-seventh Street in New York City. They had overseen its construction from the beginning.

In 1905 Ranger discovered Noank, another Connecticut town near Old Lyme. It is situated by the mouth of the Mystic River and became a recurrent subject in his painting. The woods of nearby Mason Island were also one of his favorite subjects. At his death in 1916 Ranger was a childless widower. He left his entire estate in trust to the National Academy of Design in order to establish the Ranger Fund, the income from which is still used to purchase the works of living American artists over the age of forty-five.

Ranger often wrote about his work, and in at least one instance he inveighed against restorers who, he feared, would alter his paintings in the course of their work. He wrote: "And if there is such a thing as projection of individuality through the Valley of the Shadow, I shall be awaiting Mr. Restorer on the other shore, mighty close to the landing." This is not surprising given the tonalist nature of his works, which rely on a subtle coloration that shifts ever so slightly from one passage to the next. A chapter in the exhibition catalogue explains the difficulties in restoring Ranger's canvases.

The catalogue of the exhibition contains two essays by Jack Becker and one on Ranger's technique by Lance Mayer and Gay Myers. It may be obtained from the Florence Griswold Museum shop by telephoning 860-434-5542.

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