For most Americans who pass that way today, Bridgeport, Connecticut, is a place to get through as soon as possible. Belching smokestacks, bumpy pavement, grimy houses, dingy stores, an apparently bombed-out railroad station—except for a few acres of “urban renewal” that’s the traveller’s impression; and one is puzzled by the motto still cherished by Bridgeport’s denizens: The Park City. But the prideful epithet must once have been deserved, bespeaking a pleasant suburban community on Long Island Sound, with lush green trees, elegant homes, delightful vistas. In recent years some palpable evidence of Bridgeport’s golden past has been gathered through the rediscovery of the paintings of J. F. Huge, who lived and worked there for nearly a half century. The still life opposite, for instance, painted by Huge in 1856, was animated by a pencil-sketch background depicting Bridgeport’s lively, smogless harbor, its lawned, arboreous shore, and some of its prosperously dressed citizens. Jurgan Frederick Huge was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1809, so that his surname must have been pronounced “Hooga”; after his youthful immigration to America it appears that his family preferred a kind of Frenchified version, spelled Huge and pronounced “Hewgay.” He himself, however, habitually signed his paintings J. F. Huge, and that honest version would seem to be the one he should be known by. At any rate, by 1830 the young man was married to a Bridgeport girl and had settled down as the proprietor of a well-known grocery. Drawing and painting were at first only a hobby, and his skill as an artist was self-taught; yet by 1838 he was well enough regarded to have one of his pictures printed and distributed as a color lithograph. Most of his earlier works were “portraits” of boats and ships, done to suit the demands of fond owners and captains—and this partly accounts for the meticulous attention to detail that characterizes all of Huge’s known paintings. He was in fact more of a draftsman than a painter—most of his pictures are actually colored drawings—and he had distinct limitations. His perspective sometimes went askew; the anatomy of the horse eluded him; his personae are often stiff—more like attractive dolls than human beings. But he also had a sharp eye and a strong sense of color and composition. The pictures of this primitive precisionist are almost always gracefully balanced and appealing, as well as so full of interesting detail that they repay study with a magnifying glass.

As the years went by, Huge began to portray some of Bridgeport’s splendid houses with the same scrupulous attention that he invariably gave to ships. Showing almost the exactitude of an architect’s renderings, these paintings of the homes of the wealthy are eloquent testimony to a certain grandeur that was, once upon a time, Bridgeport.

A solid businessman with a family—a son (who died young) and three daughters—Huge was listed in the Bridgeport business directory from 1862 to 1869 as “J. F. Huge,