Flagg Family Created a Group of Portraits that Spans Generations

Father and son artists, Jared Bradley Flagg and Charles Noel Flagg, were both active in Connecticut during the nineteenth century.  Jared Flagg was born in New Haven in 1820 and attended Trinity College in Hartford before taking up the study of painting, eventually settling in New York City. His son, Charles Noel Flagg, was born in Brooklyn, but spent most of his career as an artist and art teacher in Hartford, painting numerous portraits of prominent Connecticut citizens. In 1888, he founded the Connecticut League of Art Students. Many portraits by both father and son are in the collections of The Connecticut Historical Society.  Jared Bradley Flagg depicted Samuel Belcher (1779-1849) as an old man, shortly before his death.  Belcher designed both the Congregational Church in Old Lyme and the Florence Griswold House, two buildings that were later closely associated with the Old Lyme Artists’ Colony. A photograph in the CHS collection shows Charles Noel Flagg in a typical pose, at work in his Hartford studio. Jared Bradley Flagg’s brother George Whiting Flagg was also a well-known painter, specializing in historical subjects. Both Jared and George Flagg studied painting with their uncle, Washington Allston, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Other artistic families well represented in the CHS collections include the Kelloggs and the Moores.  Daniel Wright Kellogg and his brothers Edmund and Elijah were Hartford’s most important 19th-century lithographers.  Nelson Augustus Moore was both a photographer and an artist; his son Edwin and his daughter both became artists as well.