Robert Brandegee

Portrait of Robert Bolling Brandegee by Cecelia Beaux (1917)

Robert Brandegee (1849–1922) was hired by Sarah Porter in 1880 and succeeded Tuthill as art teacher at the school. He grew up in nearby Berlin, studied at E. L. Hart’s School for Boys in Farmington and loved the town. He later studied art briefly with Thomas Charles Farrer (1838–1891) in New York. In 1872 he began an eight-year sojourn in Paris, accompanied by artists Montague and Charles Noel Flagg, William Faxon and Dwight Tryon, all of Hartford, and J. Alden Weir (1852–1919) of New York. He was strongly influenced by the theories of art critic and moralist John Ruskin (a teacher of Farrer’s), and emphasized them in his teachings. Ruskin favored the accurate depiction of natural subjects, and for the country-bred, nature-loving Brandegee this was very appropriate. In fact, Brandegee did still-life paintings of natural subjects and wrote about birds for the Farmington Magazine.