NEW LONDON, CT.-Lyman Allyn Art Museum presents James Britton: Connecticut Artist through September 18, 2005. This retrospective exhibition of Connecticut-born artist James Britton (1878-1936) will feature paintings, drawings, and woodcuts. It will be the first major survey of Britton’s work in his native state since his memorial exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1936. Featured in the Lyman Allyn exhibit will be Britton’s compelling portraits and self portraits, as well as a selection of his small oil landscape sketches of the Connecticut countryside around Hartford, Waterbury, and Manchester where he lived. One gallery will be dedicated to Britton’s sketches and memorabilia, including the artist’s palette and paint cans, photographs, letters, and diary.

In 1910 Britton was the art critic for the Hartford Courant when he, along with Charles Noel Flagg and several others, founded the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts. As a mature artist he spent many years in New York City, painting and exhibiting alongside such artists as Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, George Luks, Childe Hassam and George Bellows and working an art critic for American Art News. Yet in 1925 he returned to his native Connecticut where he remained until his death in 1936.