Tyron was born on August 13, 1849, in Hartford, and died on July 1, 1925, in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He was in Hartford and East Hartford, 1849-73; and periodically, 1873-c. 1920.

The landscapes that Dwight W. Tryon painted cannot be labeled Impressionist but arc subtle and lyrical and reveal a deep love of nature, especially in its delicate, elusive phases. They relate closely to those of the American Impressionists, who followed him in time. "The personality of this painter of poetic landscapes might have disconcerted you," said artist Henry C. White of his teacher and friend in the biography The Art and Life of Dwight William Tryon, because "he was short, rather thick-set and muscular . . . . His hands, wide, with short, thick lingers, blunt at the ends, callused and gnarled as those of any sailor or farmer, gave no evidence whatever of his mastery of minute and delicate craftsmanship."

Tryon had had to develop that remarkable mastery mostly on his own. He wanted to be an artist but worked as a bookkeeper and clerk in a Hartford bookstore. He once confided his ambition to Mark Twain, a customer of the store, who found the idea lamentable. Tryon persisted and by 1873 was able to open a studio in Hartford, marry, and work full-time at art. He exhibited and sold pictures both in Hartford and New York and began to teach private students such as Henry C. White. In 1876 he went to Paris, where he studied with Jacquesson de la Chevreuse, a favorite pupil of Ingres, and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He also worked briefly with Daubigny, Harpignics, and Guillemet.

In 1881 he returned to New York and set up a studio in the Rembrandt Building on W. 57th St., where Thomas Dewing was a neighbor. Two years later he made South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, his summer home, and two years after that he joined the faculty of Smith College in Northampton, where he was for many years head of the Art Department, until his retirement in 1923. He began to spend many summers exploring Buzzards Bay on his own cruising sloop.

Tryon was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1891. His prize list is long and impressive, and he is represented in the collections of major museums. His New York dealer was Montross, and his work was collected by Charles L. Freer, who intended to devote a room to it in the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., because he believed Tryon's art, along with that of Whistler, Dewing, and Abbott Thayer, was most in sympathy with the Oriental work that made up most of his famous collection. (The plan was not carried out after Freer's death.) When Tryon died, he presented an entire art museum to Smith College. Tryon Gallery was completed a year after the artist's death but was demolished a few years ago to make way for the modern building that now houses the Smith College Museum of Art.

It is clear that from the mid-1870s on, Tryon never again had a home of his own in Connecticut. That he learned to love nature as he was growing up in this state is obvious. That he continued to visit is a conjecture based on the fact that he had family in Hartford (his family's clothing business, Stackpolc, Moore, Tryon, is still operating). That lie did visit and even painted in Connecticut after 1873 is demonstrated by Glastonbury Meadows, 1881 (cat. 57).

Further reading:
Dwight W Tyron: A Retrospective Exhibition. Exh. cat., The William Benton Museum of Art, The University of Connecticut, 1971. White, Henry C. The Life and Art of Dwight William Tryon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 193(1.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

One of America's first Tonalists, Dwight Tryon was an influential artist and teacher who popularized the muted, poetic style among fin-de-siecle audiences. Born in Connecticut, Tryon developed his technique in France, where he studied at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris and trained under Charles Daubigny in Barbizon. He returned to United States in 1881 and spent nearly forty years as an instructor at Smith College, eventually being named Director of the Art School. His atmospheric, Barbizon-inspired landscapes won countless honors, including gold medals at the American Art Association, the Carnegie Institute, the Munich Exposition of 1892, the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, and the St. Louis Expositions of 1904. The capitalist Charles Lang Freer was his lifelong patron, and the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. now houses the largest collection of Tryon's work. His paintings are also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Biography courtesy of Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, www.antiquesandfineart.com/questroyal