Milton Bond (1918 -2010)

A native of Connecticut, Bond grew up assisting his father, Captain Ashabel Bond, who owned the Bond & Currier fleet on Long Island Sound, in the operation and sailing of four sailing and three steam vessels. Their landing place was the still famous Bond’s Dock at Stratford. He is descended from Sir William Bond, who in England in the 1500’s built the largest ship of the fleet of Henry VIII.

A self-taught artist,  he painted the bygone scenes of cities, towns, and the sea and  lives in a house along the edge of the Housatonic River.

For his reverse glass paintings, he worked in a mirror world in fine detail with acrylic, ink, and metallic foil, giving a three dimensional luminosity to the exposed glass side.

He has produced over 1,500 paintings, and been featured at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London; the Grand Palais, Paris, France; the John Judkyn Museum of American Art, in Bath, England; and the New York State Historical Association, in Cooperstown, NY.

Reproductions of Bond’s paintings can be found in many books of Connecticut art, and on covers of Only In Bridgeport, An Illustrated History of the Park City, by Lennie Grimaldi, and In Pursuit of Paradise: A History of the Town of Stratford, by Louis G. Knapp.

Connecticut Governor John Rowland, on the occasion of Bond's retrospective 1998 exhibition at the Discovery Museum in Bridgeport, issued a Proclamation declaring the artist’s 80th birthday, March 5, 1998, as "Milton Bond Day."