By the time Matt Rowland’s Road, Old Lyme, CT was completed
around 1919, Clark Greenwood Voorhees (1871-1933) was well
versed in the plein air painting technique of Impressionism.
Depicting a local landscape near the Old Lyme, Connecticut, art
colony where Voorhees made his home, this painting captures the
crisp autumn air and vibrant foliage of the Connecticut
countryside. Voorhees’s even brushstrokes and thick dabs of
paint are typical of the Impressionist manner, which occupied
itself with natural effects of light and air. But in this
nostalgic image of tangled, overgrown land and a rickety bridge
emerges Voorhees’s tendencies toward Tonalism, influenced by the
American Barbizon movement. American Barbizon artists such as
George Inness (1825-1894) painted in a Tonalist manner using
washes of harmonized colors in an attempt to encourage
introspective viewing of the image, rather than sensory overload
through academic naturalism. Originating from the Barbizon
movement in the Fontainbleau region of France, th