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Robert W. Vonnoh
Lyme Art Colony
American, (September 17, 1858–December 28, 1933) In Lyme: 1905-1929
Robert Vonnoh, one of the first Americans to adopt Impressionism, was born in Hartford in 1858 to German parents. The family soon moved to Boston, where Vonnoh studied at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. In 1881 he enrolled at the Academie Julian in Paris, where he worked under Boulanger and Lefebvre, but when his money ran out in 1883, he returned to Boston and taught at several local art schools. He began to establish himself as a portrait painter.

By 1887 he was able to go to Paris for four more years. He participated in various European exhibitions, won honorable mention in the Salon of 1889, and bronze medals for two consecutive years in Paris expositions. He encountered French Impressionism during this second Paris stay, but he must have been aware of it already because Hamlin Garland (who met Vonnoh in Boston in about 1885 through the landscape painter John Enneking) wrote of these younger artists’ violent criticism of "the ‘Old Hat’ schools of Munich" and their keen interest in the "new technique in the use of color" that was "the latest word from Paris." Enneking’s friend, Lilla Cabot Perry staged an informal impressionist exhibition in her home with a group of paintings by John Breck, which "widened the influence of the new school," according to Garland.

By 1891 Vonnoh was back in America, exhibiting landscapes at a Boston gallery in November; they were "a record of impressions gathered out of doors during summer holydays in France in ’89 and ’90 and in this country the present year" ( Vonnoh wrote in the preface to the checklist) "painted earnestly and sincerely with a desire to secure interesting effects of light and color as presented in certain phases of Nature."

That same year Vonnoh became principal instructor in portrait and figure painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he remained until at least the end of 1894, when he persuaded Theodore Robinson to take his place two days a week. In Philadelphia his pupils included Robert Henri, E. W. Schofield, W. E. Redfield, John Sloan, William Glackens, and Maxfield Parrish.

Vonnah was married to Bessie O. Potter in 1899. She was a noted sculptor with whom he would often exhibit in future. They would become the first husband-wife members of the National Academy. There is evidence that the Vonnohs were in Old Lyme in 1906, but the couple probably first went there the summer of 1905. Statements that credit Vonnoh with being one of the founders of the colony in 1900 cannot be substantiated. Bessie Potter Vonnoh herself wrote that the colony was "famous" and "old" when she and her husband first visited there and that they met the Woodrow Wilson family at the Florence Griswold House - that could not have happened before 1905.

Although the Vonnohs did not participate in the annual Old Lyme art exhibitions until 1917, they returned to town regularly for at least twenty years and had a summer home in the area. They also had a place in Grez-sur-Loing, a French village beloved by the earlier generation of Barbizon painters, but Bessie Vonnoh wrote that she and her husband did not get to their French house from World War I until 1923. Instead they went to Lyme to be among many of their friends.

Once the Vonnohs began to exhibit in Lyme Art Association exhibitions, they did so regularly for about a dozen years, and Robert Vonnoh occasionally exhibited with the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts as well. In 1920 he won its top prize. His retrospective exhibitions of 1923 and 1926 traveled from New York to Kansas to California. These were one-man exhibitions, the first since his marriage not to include Bessie Potter Vonnoh’s sculptures. That gives some credence to rumors that the Vonnoh marriage failed at some point, although there was never a divorce. Sometime after 1925 Robert Vonnoh seems to have moved permanently to Grez - alone and with failing eyesight. He died in Nice in 1933. His career had included both portraiture and landscapes that were sometimes so heavy with impasto they were described as reliefs in oil.

Further reading:
Vonnoh, Bessie Potter. "Tears and Laughter Caught in Bronze." The Delineator, October, 1925, pp. 8 ff.
"The Vonnohs," International Studio, 54 (Dec. 1914), 48-52.
"Vonnoh’s Half-Century." International Studio , 77 (June, 1923), 231-33.