In Waterfall, Connecticut, 1929, Natalie Van Vleck transforms a secluded woodland scene into a tightly orchestrated arrangement of planes, lines, and contrasting rhythms. The work belongs to a formative period shortly after her family’s relocation to Woodbury, Connecticut, when the surrounding countryside became an important subject for her art. The composition turns on the relationship between the forest’s upright trunks and the water’s descending course. Dark trees frame the foreground and repeat into the distance, establishing a measured vertical rhythm. Against this framework, the stream curves from the upper center before dropping diagonally over broad, angular ledges. Ochre rock faces introduce warmth into a palette dominated by muted greens, browns, and silvery grays. At the waterfall’s base, concentric arcs and rounded clusters of foam translate the movement of water into a sequence of graphic forms. Each element participates in a larger visual order, allowing the landscape to convey both the forest’s stillness and the stream’s continuous motion.

This approach reflects Van Vleck’s training at the Art Students League. As Peter Hastings Falk explains in the 1992 exhibition catalogue "Natalie Van Vleck: A Life in Art and Nature," she studied with George Bridgman and Robert Henri before working with Max Weber in 1921 and 1922. Henri encouraged an expressive response to the subject, while Weber introduced her to Cubism and abstraction, emphasizing the importance of emotional perception. These lessons provided a foundation for her independent development. In Waterfall, Connecticut, the faceted rocks, compressed spatial intervals, and simplified tree forms suggest how she adapted modernist principles to an intimate experience of the natural world.

Van Vleck’s own account of her priorities offers a particularly useful key to the painting. Discussing her travels, she observed that “Subject matter is less important than balance, relation of forms, and rhythm.” Although prompted by her experiences in the Caribbean, this statement applies equally to her Connecticut landscapes. The waterfall supplies a subject through which she can investigate relationships between solidity and fluidity, angularity and curvature, light and shadow. The absence of a visible sky heightens the scene’s enclosure, immersing the viewer in the patterned interior of the woods. Its depth is conveyed through overlapping forms and diminishing trunks, while emphatic contours continually draw attention back to the painted surface.

The work also belongs to a significant moment in Van Vleck’s relationship with Connecticut. Her parents purchased their Woodbury farm in December 1926, and the family subsequently made it their permanent home. In 1928, she converted an old barn on the property into a studio with a large north-facing window and an adjoining woodworking shop. Painted the following year, The present painting reflects the convergence of an established artistic practice and an increasingly sustained engagement with the local landscape. Her experience carving frames, panels, and furniture offers a suggestive parallel to the painting’s sharply articulated surfaces and interlocking forms.

Van Vleck stopped painting in 1934, eventually directing her energies toward farming and the preservation of the land that became Flanders Nature Center. Seen in relation to that later commitment, this work reveals an early expression of the attentive relationship with nature that would shape her life. Its achievement lies in giving that attention a distinctive pictorial form. Through disciplined composition and a restrained, resonant palette, Van Vleck presents the woods as a place of structural complexity, quiet intensity, and enduring vitality.