At the turn of the 20th century, Connecticut played a leading role in the development of American Impressionism, as artists carried their work beyond museums to outdoor settings across the state. Willard Leroy Metcalf, born in Massachusetts in 1858, began painting the New England hills as a student in Boston and, after study and travel in France, Tunis, and Algeria in the 1880s, came to value natural light and high-keyed colors that became hallmarks of the movement he later helped develop. In 1905 he joined the art colony at Old Lyme, where his impressionistic yet closely observed paintings won wide acclaim and established him as a leading American artist. Although he later worked elsewhere in New England and traveled abroad again, he continued to paint in Connecticut at Old Lyme, Leete’s Island, Waterford, and from 1910 at times in the Housatonic Valley. From this spot, the view resembles that of his painting November Mosaic, which presented rural New England as a sparkling stream, lush meadow, friendly mountain, and plain homes set in harmony with the surrounding sunlit world, an enduring image offered during an unsettled era of urbanization. Kent Falls, among New England’s most spectacular waterfalls, features a mountain stream descending about two hundred feet in a quarter mile through falls and pools before reaching the Housatonic River, and preservation of this landscape in a state park created in part through a 1915 gift and later land purchases has allowed people to enjoy the same unspoiled natural settings that attracted hundreds of Impressionist artists to Connecticut.