Artist: George Henry Durrie (1820–1863)
Title: Winter Landscape
Date: 1859
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: height: 18 cm (7 in)
Collection: Yale University Art Gallery
What I love about this painting:
Worldbuilding is much easier if you can find an image of some sort with information about both the scenery and way people went about their daily life. Wikimedia Commons is an invaluable and free resource. One can find everything from ancient Egyptian and Sumerian art to Renaissance art, to modern art, and so on to photographs showing modern aircraft and images of our universe taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
When I need to imagine a rural 19th-century farm setting, George Henry Durrie is one of my go-to artists. He faithfully reproduced the way farms were laid out and detailed the way those families lived.
I love the calm sense of home that he instilled in his landscapes. In this scene, we see a man following a sledge hauling logs for firewood. They will be off-loaded into the woodshed and then cut into shorter lengths for fireplaces and stoves. Each section will be split before they are stacked in cords to dry. Green wood, that which is cut from a living tree, doesn’t burn as well as dry wood and isn’t suitable for cooking.
Another use for those logs could be for repairing fences. If that is their use, they will be split and stacked to dry.
Courier and Ives, a New York City-based printmaking business operating from 1835 to 1907, bought the rights to publish his work and made it possible for everyone to have artwork in their homes.
He was considered “too popular” by critics in his day. They dismissed his work because, even into the 20th-century, every ordinary working-class family had a calendar or print hanging in their home featuring one of his illustrations.
I certainly would have owned one.
About the Artist, via Wikipedia:
Durrie was born in New Haven, Connecticut, one of six children born to John and Clarissa Clark Durrie, who were Hartford natives. The Durries moved to New Haven in 1818, where John Durrie became a partner in the printing firm of Durrie and Peck, stationers and book publishers. He attended Hopkins School in New Haven. In 1837 John Durrie contracted with Nathaniel Jocelyn, a noted New Haven engraver and portrait painter, for painting instruction for George Durrie and his brother John. By 1839, George Durrie was painting portraits professionally in Hartford and Bethany, Connecticut, and in 1840, he was working in Meriden and Naugatuck, Connecticut.
For many years, Durrie made a living primarily as a portrait painter, executing hundreds of commissions. After marriage, he made frequent trips, traveling to New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia, fulfilling commissions and looking for new ones. His diary reveals that he was an enthusiastic railroad traveler, in the early days of the railroads. Durrie also painted what he called “fancy pieces”, whimsical studies of still lives or stage actors, as well as painting scenes on window-shades and fireplace covers. But portrait painting commissions became scarcer when photography came on the scene, offering a cheaper alternative to painted portraits, and, as his account-book shows, Durrie rarely painted a portrait after 1851.
In Durrie’s time, winter landscapes were not popular with most curators and critics, but nevertheless, by the time of his death, Durrie had acquired a national reputation as a snowscape painter. Durrie died in 1863, at age 43, probably from typhoid fever, not long after Currier and Ives began reproducing his paintings as prints. [1]
Credits and Attributions:
IMAGE: Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:George Henry Durrie – Winter Landscape – 1932.281 – Yale University Art Gallery.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:George_Henry_Durrie_-_Winter_Landscape_-_1932.281_-_Yale_University_Art_Gallery.jpg&oldid=1211644386 (accessed October 28, 2026).
Wikipedia contributors, “George Henry Durrie,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Henry_Durrie&oldid=1375908429 (accessed October 28, 2026).
