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John Denison Crocker

John Denison Crocker, Renaissance Man

The Slater Museum is fortunate to have in its collection a number of fine paintings, mostly oil on canvas, by John Denison Crocker. Some are portraits of people important to the development of the Norwich Free Academy, founded in 1854 and parent of the Slater; some depict captains of the city’s industrial revolution. Still others are landscapes which document, with unparalleled clarity sweetened by affection, the original nine-miles-square of Norwich and its rural environs, dotted with the occasional textile mill or church steeple.

Paintings including Mill Dam on the Upper Shetucket; Norwich Landscape; Edward Tracy Farm, Lisbon, Connecticut; and New England Mill are infused with a sensibility typical of the late 19th century, looking back to earlier eras with sentimentality and longing. The Capture of Miantonomo tells, in pictorial terms, an important historical legend of great significance and meaning to several Native American tribes of Eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island. The Capture of Miantonomo is inspired by the American narrative paintings of the west, reminiscent of Albert Bierstadt. On an aesthetic level, Crocker’s work is literally comparable to any of his era. In its historical value to southeastern Connecticut, the state and the region, Crocker’s work can be likened to that of Benjamin West, Thomas Cole and Frederic Church.

Much too little is known about John Denison Crocker, and even less written. Born in Salem, Connecticut in 1822, he spent most of his life in Norwich, dying here in 1907. At the age of nine, he was working for a wagon maker. At twelve, he was apprenticed to a silversmith and left that trade to work at the shop of a furniture maker and restorer. It was this coincidence which led him to be exposed to portrait painting. A portrait brought to the furniture shop for varnishing apparently captivated him and upon seeing it at the age of seventeen, he determined to become a portrait painter. In the characteristic form of a teen-agers’ sense of invulnerability, he knew he could that! Several sources allude to Crocker’s having sought advice, perhaps lessons or critique, from Charles Lanman of Norwich. A respected artist belonging to a prominent family, Lanman wrote for many publications, including British journals, about the wilds of the new world. Perhaps it was this influence which eventually led John Denison Crocker, essentially an autodidact, to attempt to document the rivers, harbors, trees, agricultural land and livestock of his native Southeastern Connecticut.

Yet another possible influence was the already established movement, once derisively, now commonly and affectionately, known as the “Hudson River School”. Founded by Thomas Cole in New York in the first half of the nineteenth century, the movement included a ritual wherein artists spent summers in the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains, absorbing and gaining inspiration from the wilderness. By the age of 25, around 1850, Crocker had moved (at least temporarily) to New York City and was here no doubt exposed to the still growing movement. It was, in fact, a Connecticut Yankee, Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, who supported and promoted Cole’s early work, so a style we associate with New York might be said to have deep Connecticut roots. Crocker’s work also falls into the category of White Mountain Painters and at least one painting in this group, View in New Hampshire, exists in the collection of Smithsonian.

In New York, Crocker roomed with two other artists, painter Joseph Dunn and lithographer A. Miller. As was the practice of male painters of the era, it is likely that he spent time in a Catskill cabin with other artists. Immersed in the wilderness, they became familiar with the visual language of the flora, fauna, landscape and Native Americans of the region, developing a style that became ubiquitous from the Northeast west to Ohio and from the early 19th century into the early 20th century.

In addition to and beginning before landscapes, Crocker devoted his efforts to portraiture. Judging from portraits in the Slater Museum’s collection, in this, too, he was a prolific documentarian. From members of his own family to founders and leaders of the Norwich Free Academy, Crocker recorded the residents of Norwich at a time when photography was just becoming available to the masses. From examining his portraits, one can conjecture that he used photographs as an aid to refresh his memory of a likeness and to present an accurate representation of clothing and accessories. Photographically aided or not, and like his views of Norwich vistas, Crocker’s portraits were marvels of documentation. His Harriet Elizabeth Dillaby Crocker (and child), painted in the mid-nineteenth century, and Celeste Lydia Kenyon Beckwith, c. 1876, depict brooches, lace, earrings, rings, a buckled watch strap and a gold watch-tie with nearly photographic accuracy. The portrait of his daughter Harriet Elizabeth (Daughter of the Artist) as a young girl has her encircled with an oval frame and necklace of leaves of both representational and fantastical qualities.

In many ways, Crocker’s work, especially the landscapes, owe a huge debt to his artistic forbears and while he was essentially unschooled, he clearly studied earlier work. As in the work of Aaron Shattuck, Alvan Fisher and Asher Durand, cows play a starring role in his numerous generic images of country scenes. Indeed, one of the metrics the Slater Museum has come to use when it is asked to help authenticate an unsigned Crocker is the presence and placement of cows. Crocker’s particular rendering of leaves and his bower of trees form a proscenium arch, drawing the view ever deeper into the picture. The formula might be called a convention among American landscape painters of the 18th and 19th centuries. Crocker, however, rarely fails to include one dead, though graceful, seemingly animated, tree.

Crocker’s work is nostalgic yet ambivalent in its depiction of panoramic and uniquely American landscapes. Always touched by human intervention, these vistas might include a tiny cabin in a Herculean forest, a train choogling through cultivated fields, a brick and granite mill building seen in the distance along a river bank, a church steeple tucked among the autumn foliage, a utilitarian colonial farmhouse, an elegant high Victorian mansion, a single sailboat on the glassy river.

Betsy Kornhauser, Krieble Curator of American Painting & Sculpture and Associate Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford has said of Crocker, “ As a painter of the American landscape, John Denison Crocker followed in the footsteps of more prominent 19th century artists, in particular, Thomas Cole, …. The works of Cole and his student, Hartford native Frederic Church, hung in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, which opened to the public in 1844, and where Crocker would have had access to study their work. Crocker would later pay homage to Cole when he painted ‘Home in the Wilderness’ (1853, Wadsworth Atheneum) which was inspired by two paintings by Cole of the same subject: ‘The Hunter's Return’ (1845, Amon Carter Museum) and ‘Home in the Woods’ (1847, Reynolda House Museum of American Art). All three paintings deal with the subject of white settlement of the frontier. Families living in log cabins thrive in bucolic wilderness settings.”

The sentiment evident in Crocker’s work could stem from the time and place in which he lived. Settled among the earliest towns in Connecticut, Norwich was incorporated in 1659. At the time, relations between the native tribes and the Europeans was intimate. Each needed the other. The city began to emerge as an economic powerhouse in the middle of the 18th century, producing titans of American history who would sign the declaration of independence, provide early leadership (and fall from grace in acts of treason) before, during and after the war for independence, go on to establish cities in the “Western Reserve” and invent remarkable innovations.

The shipping trades, coupled with surrounding agriculture, contributed mightily to Norwich’s early success. For over a century the city continued to grow and prosper, becoming an essential supplier to the Union’s battle to re-unite the young country. In the late 19th century, Norwich was reaching the zenith of its wealth and influence. Manufacturing and shipping of an immense array of products made it possible for city leaders to offer excellent health care through Backus Hospital (founded 1893), the best in independent education for all students regardless of economic or ethnic background through the Norwich Free Academy (founded 1854) and access to the world’s greatest art through the Slater Museum (1888) whose opening was attended by dignitaries who arrived by chartered private trains from New York City and Boston. The Boston train included the socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner and Harvard Art History professor Charles Eliot Norton, the director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Charles G. Loring and the president of M.I.T. Francis A. Walker. The Hartford contingent included Henry Barnard, credited with being the father of American public education.

John Denison Crocker’s life virtually followed the arc of Norwich’s greatest fortune during its industrial revolution to the beginning of its plummeting descent. Like the city, his success as a youth was due largely to his personal natural resources. Like Norwich, he assayed several pursuits and prospered through their diversity, including his painting. Crocker’s two brothers, one a “machinist” and one a lawyer invented and patented a cork-cutting machine. Returning from a voyage to Europe to seek (and successfully acquire patents there) for the machine, they were both lost in shipwreck. John Dension Crocker would later improve the design and acquire the patent to successor cork-cutting machinery. Prior to the Crockers’ inventions, corks were cut by hand. With the latter-day advent of plastic corks, one can only wistfully think of the Crockers when opening a bottle of Pinot Noir.

Crocker married Harriet Elizabeth Dillaby at age 27 in 1849 and they had eight children. Family members provided grist for his artistic mill and possibly examples used to promote his skills as a portrait painter for paying clients. In fact, mill owners figure prominently in Norwich history, the city having been a 19th century center for textile production, an industry brought from Rhode Island by John Fox Slater. Crocker painted numerous portraits of his wife and daughters, many held in the collection of the Slater Museum. Other Crocker relatives included in Slater’s collection are Charles Augustus Rallion, a woolen mill owner, his wife Calista Corbin Rallion and their daughter Almira.

The Slater’s collection includes two Crocker portraits of Henry B. Norton, who arrived in Norwich a pauper from Branford but became president of the Norwich & New York Transportation Company which operated steamships, hauling the city’s prodigious product to the larger port for distribution worldwide. Shortly after his arrival in Norwich, Norton became a partner in Backus and Norton, which later became Norton, Converse & Company, and then Norton Brothers, dealing in wholesale groceries. He subsequently served as the president of the Attawaugan Mill, a large manufacturer of cotton cloth. Henry B. Norton was a founding trustee of the Norwich Free Academy and the Norwich Y.M.C.A., leaving $200,000 in 1891 to fund a new building at the academy.

The Slater’s Crocker collection includes a portrait of William W. Backus, scion of a family whose prodigious wealth came from the early establishment of a foundry and gun manufactory in the Yantic section of Norwich. Latter-day researchers have conjectured that Backus competed with William Slater for the title of top philanthropist in the city. Backus may have won the battle, achieving his name on the city’s hospital, though Slater’s gift was larger.

Crocker also painted a portrait of Colonel Charles A. Converse, a founder of Hopkins & Allen Manufacturing Company which made derringers, a ubiquitous and dangerously available handgun. Among gun makers, Hopkins & Allen was considered only third in the nation behind Colt in Hartford and Winchester in New Haven. Although William Slater has been credited with persuading Colonel Converse to donate funds sufficient to build a new art building at the Norwich Free Academy, Hannah Dodge, the wife of NFA Art School director Ozias Dodge, spoke of her efforts to charm Converse. She recounted many years later that she satisfied his prurient interests by sitting on his lap, sealing the deal. The Slater Museum’s changing gallery is named the Converse Art Gallery and Crocker’s portrait of the patron hangs permanently in it.

Hanging in Norwich City Hall, commanding council chambers from a perch above the dais which accommodates the board table, is Crocker’s spectacular portrait of John Duane Park, Connecticut Supreme Court Chief Justice from 1874 to1889. Judge Park was man of considerable standing, both physically and intellectually. He was not without his peculiarities, though, and, in an article published in the journal of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association, Attorney Wayne G. Tillinghast, reveals interesting details about his politics as a member of the nascent Republican Party, his home life including his wont to read in a tree-house built with a gang plank directly from the tree to an upper floor of his Laurel Hill home, and a possible temporary insanity wherein he shot at late-night swimmers making noise in the banks of the Thames, disturbing the Judge’s sleep.

The portrait is a composition in grays. The long beard of the judge forms a triangle impossible for the eye to avoid and seeming to point directly at Judge Park’s eyes. Crocker did not universally sign his work. The relatively large signature on the Park portrait, located conspicuously along the side of a table upon which the judge leans, reflects Crocker’s satisfaction with his work.

Present day families whose lineage goes back to the original settlement of Norwich own Crocker portraits of their ancestors and paintings depicting their farms and fields. The Norwich Harbor was a favorite motif and Crocker painted it from many angles. The accuracy of his work can be measured by photographs of the same locations taken fifty, then one hundred, then one hundred and fifty years later. Only the layering of new architecture on old has changed. Crocker’s listing as a painter in Norwich city directories indicates that he would have been able to support his large family from this work. His skills and vision as a painter notwithstanding, Crocker propelled himself into the spheres of patent medicine and mechanical equipment. He created a cure-all called “Crocker’s Magical Stomach Powders”, the label of which (doubling as a wrapper) presents the philosophical, social and political opinions of the manufacturer and guarantees the contents to be “a sure cure for Indigestion and all Bowel Difficulties and Colds”. Further, the label claims that “If taken in time these powders will ward off all infections and diseases”. Anyone born in the second half of the twentieth century wondering about the origins of the arcane phrase “Take a Powder”, need only to consider Crocker’s concoction.

Crocker’s knowledge of herbs and plant extracts must have made it possible for him to produce and distribute several well received varnishes and coatings, including a boot polish and water-proofing agent. The Slater’s archives include a letter from Seymour J. Guy wherein he states “The varnish or gloss applied by you to my two little pictures is as far as I am able to judge of it in this short time, an excellent article for artistic use, both as a varnish and as a painting vehicle. In a few days it dries firmly with a desirable gloss, and the coloring of the picture is charmingly revivified. I shall not hesitate to use it for either of the above purposes.”

His rights to the new file-cutting machine were granted on February 28, 1865. The Slater Museum’s archives hold a newspaper clipping listing John D. Crocker’s patent claim, his application and the final patent approval documents. The latter provide a remarkable window into the bureaucracy of such transactions in the nineteenth century. The pre-printed components of the forms comprise standard language in cursive lettering, with “the blanks” filled in with an equally fluid and regular handwriting in pen. Green silk ribbons bind the seven 12 by 14 inch pages, including the drawings on textile. The ribbons are sealed to the bundle’s front page with a yellow applied starburst label resembling an official corporate or government seal.

Crocker’s powers of observation in portraiture and landscape painting, as well as in researching materials and techniques for developing “modern” goods make him a clear product of the industrial revolution. A realization that industrialization would make a permanent mark on Norwich might have partly prompted him to record, and thus preserve, his family, fellow Norwichians and the city’s agrarian environs. His work is represented in the collections of the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Smithsonian, the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. While some may consider him a “lesser” artist in the pantheon of the Hudson River School and White Mountain Painters, much of his work shows a pure, visionary genius. His desire to stay “home”, committing to his family and to Norwich may have prevented him from acquiring amore global reputation. Some of his work fails to hide the struggle for excellence. But those that succeed do so mightily and rival the work of any American painter of the 19th century.

Sources: The website botanicals.com Caulkins, Frances Manwaring; History of Norwich, Connecticut, From Its Possession by the Indians, to the Year 1866, Hartford: Case, Lockwood and Company, 1866 Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin; “Daniel Wadsworth and the Hudson River School”, Hog River Journal, Volume 3, Number 1, Hartford: Hartford Public Library, November, December, 2004/January 2005 Lathrop, Arthur L.; Victorian Norwich, Salem, Mass: Higginson Book Company, 1999 Leavens, Francis J.; The Portraits Hung in the Slater Memorial Hall and other Academy Buildings, Norwich, CT: Norwich free Academy press, 1922 Deák, Gloria Gilda; Picturing America, 1497-1899:prints, maps, and drawings … of the territory that is now the United States, Princeton: Princeton University press, 1988 Flexner, James Thomas; Nineteenth Century American Painting, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970 French, H. W.; Art and Artists in Connecticut, New York: Da Capo Press, 1970 Stebbins, Theodore E.; The Hudson River School: 19th century American Landscapes in the Wadsworth Atheneum … , Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1976 Taylor, Joshua C.; America as Art, Washington, D. C., Smithsonian Institution, 1976 Tillinghast, Wayne G., “The Curious Obituary Sketch of Chief Justice Park”; 9 CTLA Forum 9-13 (November/December 1991). The website viableherbalsolutions.com

Many thanks to Slater Museum Education Coordinator Mary-Anne Hall for her research assistance and to James Bussey, great-great grandson of the artist for the loan of family memorabilia and important Crocker artifacts.

Biography Courtesy of Vivian F. Zoe, Director Slater Memorial Museum 108 Crescent Street Norwich, CT 06360
www.norwichfreeacademy.com

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