Driving an Art Bargain

BY JOE BILLS

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL MULLAN

When the first stop on our journey lasts well over three hours, I realize that my goal of experiencing the entire Connecticut Art Trail won’t be met this weekend. No surprise, really: Linking nearly two dozen museums across the state, the 250-mile “trail” is more a marketing and programming collaboration than an actual route that travelers are meant to follow. Still, it’s good to have ambition, even if I’m suddenly aware that mine will need adjusting.

Launched 25 years ago as the Connecticut Impressionist Art Trail to celebrate the state’s leading role in the evolution of American Impressionism, the project today carries a shorter name to reflect its many additional kinds of museums and sites.

One of the brilliant threads that hold this innovative tapestry together is a little booklet, the Art Trail Passport, which can be purchased online or at member museums for $25. Good for a year, it grants a single admission to each of the 21 member museums, essentially merging them into a single sprawling entity, a multicampus museum that would rank among the best anywhere. (There are also two affiliate institutions on the trail, New Canaan’s Glass House and Silvermine Arts Center, but they don’t participate in the passport program.)

Joining me on my Connecticut Art Trail journey is a friend who also happens to be an arts journalist. I’m always happy to have her with me, but even more so on this trip: Her knowledge is my guide. When she “oohs” and “aahs” over a particular work, I know I should pay attention.

Our home base for this arts-immersion weekend is the posh Delamar Southport, so we launch our excursion in the southwest corner of the state, where the largest cluster of member museums is located. And our first two stops, coincidentally, perfectly encapsulate the Connecticut Art Trail’s diversity.

We start at Wilton’s Weir Farm National Historic Site , where artist Julian Alden Weir made his summer home from 1882 to 1919. Weir acquired these 153 acres in exchange for a painting and 10 dollars. Classically trained, Weir initially disliked Impressionism— given how it de-emphasized realism in favor of light, color, and movement— but his attempts to portray this landscape helped change his mind. As we walk the grounds, we are surrounded by the same views that inspired Weir and his contemporaries to gather here to paint en plein air. Weir left an artistic legacy that was built upon by succeeding generations of artists, including his daughter, painter Dorothy Weir Young, and her husband, sculptor Mahonri Young, whose massive creations were fashioned in a multilevel studio that is now a fascinating part of the Weir Farm tour.