George Henry Durrie

George Henry Durrie was an American landscape artist and illustrator who focused on rural New England paintings. He was born on June 6, 1820, in New Haven, Connecticut. He began portrait painting as a teenager; however it was the landscape paintings later in his career that became popular. Unlike many artists of this time, Durrie was mostly self-taught, though he did receive some training in his twenties under Nathaniel Jocelyn’s tutelage.

To help supplement his art income, George Durrie submitted illustrations to the local newspaper, as well as framed pictures and did some decorative painting. His genre landscape paintings were small but detailed and highly intimate. It wasn’t until a lithograph company, Currier & Ives, successfully reproduced a few of his winter landscapes for calendars that Durrie’s art became well-known. Despite briefly having a studio in New York, George Henry Durrie did not travel much and died in his hometown of New Haven on October 17, 1863.