Object Type: Painting

Medium and Support: oil on canvas

Credit Line: Florence Griswold Museum Purchase

Accession Number: 2015.12

Australian-born Martin Lewis made his way to America as a young man and became one of the leading printmakers of the twentieth century. Lewis is best known for his etchings, aquatints, engravings, and drypoints of New York City’s bustling street life, images that often share a noirish sensibility with the work of Edward Hopper with their occasional emphasis on solitude.

During the Depression, Lewis moved to Connecticut, where he lived in Newtown between 1932 and 1936. There, he focused on Regionalist depictions of rural life, as well as on the ways the city reaches into the country through networks of commuter rail and suburban development. "Dawn, Sandy Hook, Connecticut" presents one such landscape: a phalanx of nearly identical houses ends at a raw patch of ground crossed by two commuters leaving home as dawn breaks in the sky to the left. Like his subjects, Lewis himself commuted into New York, where he and artists George Miller and Armin Landeck ran a shortlived “School for Printers” in 1934. The composition exhibits Lewis’s characteristically strong sense of design informed by his period of study and travel in Japan in the 1920s. Here, the bold contrast between light and dark is enlivened by his stark but poetic palette of blues, purples, and creams.

Prints dominate Lewis’s oeuvre, but he painted and sketched extensively and was praised in his lifetime for his versatility and flawless command of technique in each media. While some of his oils and watercolors relate to prints, the catalogue raisonné of Lewis’s prints does not include any compositions based on "Dawn, Sandy Hook, Connecticut," indicating that it is not a study but a full-fledged work in its own right. Lewis was represented by Kennedy Gallery in the late 1920s and 1930s.

"Dawn, Sandy Hook, Connecticut" touches on essential themes of life during the Depression and speaks to the reality of Americans dividing themselves between the city and the country that is a leitmotif for Connecticut artists.