Brook Farm with Rainbow
Oil on canvas by Josiah Wolcott, 1845
61.2 cm x 74 cm
This contemporary depiction of Brook Farm with a rainbow overhead was painted by Josiah Wolcott, a member of the community. In 1841, George and Sophia Ripley founded the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, the best-known utopian experiment in America, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. They envisioned the cooperative community as an application of Transcendentalism, the mid-19th-century social movement. To support their experiment in "plain living and high thinking," the Brook Farmers ran a progressive school; published a journal devoted to social reform, The Harbinger; and manufactured oil lamps and other utilitarian pewter ware.
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