HPL Blogs

Christmas was Richard Welling’s favorite time of the year, and just in time for the holiday, the Hartford History Center at Hartford Public Library has received a generous gift from the late Hartford artist’s family.

Welling, who died in 2009, chronicled Hartford’s changing skyline for decades in well-known pen-and-ink line drawings and became the city’s unofficial artist-historian. In some instances, he was hired by developers to sketch buildings under construction.

His daughters Debrah Welling and Lisa Welling Riss recently donated dozens of his works including line drawings, lino block prints and previously unpublished writings that chronicle his schooling in West Hartford, his military service as a teenager during World War II and his career as an artist. The items will be catalogued and added to the Hartford History Center’s existing online Richard Welling Collection.

“Richard Welling brought to all of us a line that was uniquely graceful and clear, innovative and evocative,” said Brenda Miller, executive director of culture and communication and head of the Hartford History Center. “He did more than just preserve the image of a place, he captured the essence of that place and then he shared it with all who viewed his work. To make his art available for public research here in the Library’s Hartford History Center helps us to further document a period of great change in this city’s-built environment, and we find that invaluable.”

Debrah Welling said the family went to some length to sort through thousands of works their father left behind when he died, spending hours in his studio/apartment in Hartford sorting through boxes and portfolios.

“We felt it was our obligation to protect the legacy of his work, and it’s quite a record of a time period,” she said of the family’s efforts to preserve his drawings by donating them to institutions like the Hartford Public Library where they can be digitized and made available for public viewing. “He wasn’t a painter, he made drawings, they were of buildings and cities and they have historical value.”

She said her father’s interest in drawing buildings stemmed from his love of mechanical things and understanding how the world around him worked.

“I’ve always been a sucker for construction work,” he told The Hartford Courant in 1985. “I can look at it for hours. This way, I get paid for it.”

Black-and-white line drawings also made sense for the artist, since he was born colorblind, Debrah Welling said.

Welling’s work also included scenes of demolition of historic buildings to make way for the new construction, and he told reporters that he was forced to relocate his Hartford studio four times as the buildings he worked out of were faced with the wrecking ball.

“He joked that when Welling moves in they know the building is going to come down,” Debrah Welling said.

While the majority of his drawings were in Hartford, he also traveled to New York City, where he had studied at the world-renowned Parsons School of Design, and drew scenes there. After 9/11, he donated drawings of the construction of the twin towers at the World Trade Center to the New York Historical Society.

But Debrah Welling said her father never strayed too far from Hartford. He loved the city where he had spent his life, and a fear of flying meant he never traveled overseas, except as a soldier in World War II, where he was transported there and back on a troop ship.

In addition to his drawings, Welling wrote several books on artistic techniques and taught drawing classes to youths in Greater Hartford, some of whom went on to have careers in art or architecture.

His love of Christmas, his daughter said, was just one of his eccentricities. He would decorate his apartment/studio with an abundance of holiday lights that remained there yearround and spent all year long ordering gifts to distribute around the holiday. An artificial Christmas tree remained up all year too.

“He was an individual and he had a definite artistic sensibility and a playfulness too,” Debrah Welling said.

See below for a sampling of some of the works that were recently donated to the Hartford History Center.