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The Place Contentment Island is a world apart. It lies just off the coast of Connecticut, in the town of Darien, 40 miles northeast of New York City. Joined to the mainland by a short, narrow causeway, it lies low in the sparkling waters of Long Island Sound, a tangle of thick woods, streams, and marshland. Granite boulders piled high by prehistoric glaciers create pockets of shadowed privacy among dramatic shifts in elevation along the wide horizon.
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Contentment Island, 1907 |
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It was a place of undefined form when John Kensett arrived with his friend Vincent Colyer in 1867, its outline merely suggested on nineteenth century maps. Salt marshes and restless tides rendered its boundaries fluid to mapmakers then. It remains a place separated from public attention, a cluster of private roads cut off from the bustling village of Darien by Interstate 95, one of the nation’s busiest highways.
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Kensett and Colyer came to the area in the aftermath of the Civil War, seeking a place of retreat. They built a home and studios on the island, where Kensett created some of the most remarkable landscapes of his successful career. Between 1867 and 1872, the year of his death, Kensett painted landscapes that were fundamentally different from the work the public had come to expect from him. These paintings, based on the views from his Contentment Island home, captured a nation in transition and influenced the next generation of landscape artists. Image: Vincent Colyer's house on Contentment Island, southern elevation. Kensett's bedroom is believed to have extended the full width of the southern elevation on the third floor. The studio is visible on the second floor at the extreme right.
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Changes in the land have altered some of the features of the landscape Kensett painted with the careful observation that was a hallmark of his work. However, current residents, who have come to know the area in its changing cycles of light and tide, recognize the landscape immediately upon seeing Kensett’s paintings.
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First-time visitors who know the paintings are immediately in familiar surroundings at Contentment Island, with the Fish Islands as their compass. The Fish Islands, formed of bedrock rather than the more malleable glacial deposits that formed the nearby Norwalk Islands, are startlingly unchanged from Kensett’s time. Their distinctive form, featured in many of Kensett’s scenes of the Connecticut coast, helps to orient viewers to his Connecticut scenes, and becomes the icon identifying the artist and his place on the Connecticut shore.
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