In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism. Its founding members included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, among others. The group was unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon, for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected artworks and awarded medals. The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting. The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school, although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be known, the Impressionists. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.
Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “impression,” not a finished painting. It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions, such as in Alfred Sisley’s 1878 Allée of Chestnut Trees (1975.1.211). This seemingly casual style became widely accepted, even in the official Salon, as the new language with which to depict modern life.

In addition to their radical technique, the bright colors of Impressionist canvases were shocking for eyes accustomed to the more sober colors of Academic painting. Many of the independent artists chose not to apply the thick golden varnish that painters customarily used to tone down their works. The paints themselves were more vivid as well. The nineteenth century saw the development of synthetic pigments for artists’ paints, providing vibrant shades of blue, green, and yellow that painters had never used before. Édouard Manet’s 1874 Boating (29.100.115), for example, features an expanse of the new Cerulean blue and synthetic ultramarine. Depicted in a radically cropped, Japanese-inspired composition, the fashionable boater and his companion embody modernity in their form, their subject matter, and the very materials used to paint them.

Such images of suburban and rural leisure outside of Paris were a popular subject for the Impressionists, notably Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Several of them lived in the country for part or all of the year. New railway lines radiating out from the city made travel so convenient that Parisians virtually flooded into the countryside every weekend. While some of the Impressionists, such as Pissarro, focused on the daily life of local villagers in Pontoise, most preferred to depict the vacationers’ rural pastimes. The boating and bathing establishments that flourished in these regions became favorite motifs. In his 1869 La Grenouillère (29.100.112), for example, Monet’s characteristically loose painting style complements the leisure activities he portrays. Landscapes, which figure prominently in Impressionist art, were also brought up to date with innovative compositions, light effects, and use of color. Monet in particular emphasized the modernization of the landscape by including railways and factories, signs of encroaching industrialization that would have seemed inappropriate to the Barbizon artists of the previous generation.

Perhaps the prime site of modernity in the late nineteenth century was the city of Paris itself, renovated between 1853 and 1870 under Emperor Napoleon III. His prefect, Baron Haussmann, laid the plans, tearing down old buildings to create more open space for a cleaner, safer city. Also contributing to its new look was the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), which required reconstructing the parts of the city that had been destroyed. Impressionists such as Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte enthusiastically painted the renovated city, employing their new style to depict its wide boulevards, public gardens, and grand buildings. While some focused on the cityscapes, others turned their sights to the city’s inhabitants. The Paris population explosion after the Franco-Prussian War gave them a tremendous amount of material for their scenes of urban life. Characteristic of these scenes was the mixing of social classes that took place in public settings. Degas and Caillebotte focused on working people, including singers and dancers, as well as workmen. Others, including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, depicted the privileged classes. The Impressionists also painted new forms of leisure, including theatrical entertainment (such as Cassatt’s 1878 In the Loge [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]), cafés, popular concerts, and dances. Taking an approach similar to Naturalist writers such as Émile Zola, the painters of urban scenes depicted fleeting yet typical moments in the lives of characters they observed. Caillebotte’s 1877 Paris Street, Rainy Day (Art Institute, Chicago) exemplifies how these artists abandoned sentimental depictions and explicit narratives, adopting instead a detached, objective view that merely suggests what is going on.

The independent collective had a fluid membership over the course of the eight exhibitions it organized between 1874 and 1886, with the number of participating artists ranging from nine to thirty. Pissarro, the eldest, was the only artist who exhibited in all eight shows, while Morisot participated in seven. Ideas for an independent exhibition had been discussed as early as 1867, but the Franco-Prussian War intervened. The painter Frédéric Bazille, who had been leading the efforts, was killed in the war. Subsequent exhibitions were headed by different artists. Philosophical and political differences among the artists led to heated disputes and fractures, causing fluctuations in the contributors. The exhibitions even included the works of more conservative artists who simply refused to submit their work to the Salon jury. Also participating in the independent exhibitions were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, whose later styles grew out of their early work with the Impressionists.

The last of the independent exhibitions in 1886 also saw the beginning of a new phase in avant-garde painting. By this time, few of the participants were working in a recognizably Impressionist manner. Most of the core members were developing new, individual styles that caused ruptures in the group’s tenuous unity. Pissarro promoted the participation of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in addition to adopting their new technique based on points of pure color, known as Neo-Impressionism. The young Gauguin was making forays into Primitivism. The nascent Symbolist Odilon Redon also contributed, though his style was unlike that of any other participant. Because of the group’s stylistic and philosophical fragmentation, and because of the need for assured income, some of the core members such as Monet and Renoir exhibited in venues where their works were more likely to sell.

Its many facets and varied participants make the Impressionist movement difficult to define. Indeed, its life seems as fleeting as the light effects it sought to capture. Even so, Impressionism was a movement of enduring consequence, as its embrace of modernity made it the springboard for later avant-garde art in Europe.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm

After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the United States gained unprecedented international political and economic status. American art patrons—notably Northerners who had made fortunes from the war—traveled abroad and imbibed European culture. To announce their wealth and sophistication, they built grand houses and filled them with imported decorative arts and paintings by old masters and contemporary academics. To appeal to prospective patrons, aspiring American artists studied in Europe, especially Paris.

Soon after Americans began earnestly to collect and emulate European art, the French Impressionists made their debut in a private exhibition in Paris in 1874; they would show together eight times in all, until 1886. Rejecting the academics’ devotion to invented subjects and meticulous technique, Impressionist painters depicted landscapes and intimate scenes of everyday middle-class life using natural light, rapid brushwork, and a high-keyed palette. Young Americans in Paris in the 1870s, studying with academic teachers such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, ignored Impressionism. The few who took note of the radical style were repelled. After visiting the third group exhibition in the spring of 1877, J. Alden Weir wrote to his parents: “I never in my life saw more horrible things…. They do not observe drawing nor form but give you an impression of what they call nature. It was worse than the Chamber of Horrors.” 

There were exceptions to the American disdain of Impressionism during its early years. Pennsylvania-born Mary Cassatt, who moved to Paris in 1874, was sympathetic. Her work attracted the attention of Edgar Degas, who, in 1877, invited her to exhibit with the group. John Singer Sargent, born in Florence to expatriate American parents and studying in Paris by 1874, met Claude Monet two years later and was inspired by him and his colleagues to paint lively urban scenes. 

During the mid-1880s, as French Impressionism lost its radical edge, American collectors began to value the style, and more American artists began to experiment with it after absorbing academic fundamentals. Exhibitions of Impressionist works were held in American cities and sales were strong. In 1886, with a series of brilliant images of New York’s new public parks, William Merritt Chase became the first major American painter to create Impressionist canvases in the United States. At about the same time, Americans began to visit artists’ colonies that centered on outdoor painting, most notably Giverny, where Monet had settled in 1883. Those who sought inspiration there included Sargent, Willard Metcalf, and Theodore Robinson, who transmitted Monet’s ideas to his compatriots back in the United States. 

By the early 1890s, Impressionism was firmly established as a valid style of painting for American artists. Even Weir was a convert. Most of the repatriated American Impressionists lived in the Northeast, tapping into the cultural energy that was increasingly concentrated in New York. Some of them taught in the new art schools that were a consequence of the growing professionalism; others conducted summer classes dedicated to Impressionism, as Chase did on the east end of Long Island from 1891 until 1902 and as John Henry Twachtman did in Cos Cob, Connecticut, during the 1890s. 

The American Impressionists were much more cosmopolitan than their French counterparts. Several were expatriates or spent long periods in Europe; those who repatriated often crossed the Atlantic to attend exhibitions, visit museums, and work in artists’ colonies. In Europe and the United States, the American Impressionists witnessed the transformation from an agrarian to an industrialized urban society. They were simultaneously excited by change and nostalgic for the reassuring and familiar past. 

While some American artists adopted only the surface effects of Impressionism, simply to accommodate collectors’ evolving taste, many of them shared the French Impressionists’ conviction that modern life should be recorded in a vibrant modern style. Their works, like those of their French counterparts, appear to be infused not only with light and color but with meanings inherent in the subjects they depicted. Some were captivated by the energy of urban life, responding to the fragmented experience that marked the age in rapidly rendered vignettes. Childe Hassam, for example, caught the flavor of characteristic neighborhoods in New York and Paris. But most American Impressionists chose to portray the countryside to which urbanites like themselves and their patrons retreated. Many favored artists’ colonies, especially those with architecture and activities that evoked a more tranquil era. In England, for example, Sargent found respite from the portrait studio by painting pastoral scenes in Broadway, a charming village in the Cotswolds. Repatriated Impressionists founded and frequented similarly picturesque colonies: the Isles of Shoals, off the New Hampshire coast, where Hassam painted, and Southampton, New York, where Chase taught and worked. Some American Impressionists worked alone in other distinctive rural locales. Twachtman found inspiration on his farm in Greenwich, Connecticut. 

Vignettes of domestic life also engaged the American Impressionists. Cassatt, Edmund Tarbell, Frank W. Benson, and others often depicted women and children in tranquil interiors and gardens that ignored or denied the epochal changes taking place beyond their walls. 

Many American artists worked in the Impressionist style into the 1920s, but innovation had long since waned. By 1910, the less genteel approach of urban realists known as the Ashcan School had emerged. In 1913, the immense display of avant-garde European art at the Armory Show made even the Ashcan School seem old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the American Impressionists’ focus on familiar subjects and rapid technique left an indelible mark on American painting. Their works bear witness to their creators’ experiences abroad and at home, and offer tantalizing reflections of a dynamic period as well as enchanting records of color and light.http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aimp/hd_aimp.htm

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frank W. Benson, Eleanor Holding a Shell, North Haven, Maine, 1902, private collection.

Impressionism, a style of painting characterized by loose brushwork and vivid colors, was practiced widely among American artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[edit]An emerging artistic style from Paris

Theodore Robinson, Low TideRiverside Yacht Club, (1894), Collection of Margaret and Raymond Horowitz

Impressionism emerged as an artistic style in France in the 1860s. Major exhibitions of French impressionist works in Boston and New York in the 1880s introduced the style to the American public. Some of the first American artists to paint in an impressionistic mode, such as Theodore Robinson, did so in the late 1880s after visiting France and meeting with artists such as Claude Monet. Others, such asChilde Hassam, took notice of the increasing numbers of French impressionist works at American exhibitions.

[edit]Turn of the century trailblazers

From the 1890s through the 1910s, American impressionism flourished in art colonies—loosely affiliated groups of artists who lived and worked together and shared a common aesthetic vision. Art colonies tended to form in small towns that provided affordable living, abundant scenery for painting, and relatively easy access to large cities where artists could sell their work. Some of the most important American impressionist artists gathered at Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, both on Long Island Sound; New Hope, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River; and Brown County, Indiana. American impressionist artists also thrived in California at Carmel and Laguna Beach; in New York on eastern Long Island at Shinnecock, largely due to the influence of William Merritt Chase; and in Boston where Edmund Charles Tarbell andFrank Weston Benson became important practitioners of the impressionist style.

[edit]Jazz age artists’ colonies fizzled

Some American art colonies remained vibrant centers of impressionist art into the 1920s. However, impressionism in America lost its cutting-edge status in 1913 when a historical exhibition of modern art took place at the 69th Regiment Armory building in New York City. The “Armory Show”, as it came to be called, heralded a new painting style regarded as more in touch with the increasingly fast-paced and chaotic world, especially with the outbreak of World War I. The Great Depression and World War II.

[edit]The rebirth of impressionism in America: The 1950s and beyond

In the 1950s, a quarter of a century after the death of Monet, major museums in America started having exhibitions of the original French Impressionists paintings, and in so doing Impressionism was reborn. The resurgence of interest in Impressionism continues to this day, and is especially evident in the continued popularity of plein-air painting.

[edit]Notable American impressionists

Prominent impressionist painters, from the United States include:

[edit]Gallery

Childe Hassam, Celia Thaxter’s Garden, 1890,The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Edmund C. Tarbell, In the Orchard, 1891,Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

William Merritt Chase, Idle Hours, 1894, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

John Henry Twachtman,The White Bridge, ca. 1895, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

[edit]See also

• Impressionism
• Pennsylvania Impressionism
• Hoosier Group

[edit]References

• Gerdts, William H. (2001). American Impressionism (Second Edition ed.). New York: Abbeville Press Publishers. ISBN 0-7892-0737-0.
• Moure,Nancy (1998). California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media. Los Angeles: Dustin Publications. ISBN 0-9614622-4-8.
• Gerdts, William H. and South, Will (1998). California Impressionism. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-7892-0176-3.
• Landauer, Susan (Editor) (1996). California Impressionists. Athens, Ga.: The Irvine Museum and Georgia Museum of Art. ISBN 0-915977-25-7.
• Weinberg, Barbara H. (2004). Childe Hassam: American Impressionist. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 1-58839-119-1.
• Larkin, Susan G. (2001). The Cos Cob Art Colony. New York: the National Academy of Design. ISBN 0-300-08852-3.
• Westphal, Ruth Lilly (Editor) (1986). Plein Air Painters of California: The North. Irvine, Calif.: Westphal Publishing. ISBN 0-9610520-1-5.
• Westphal, Ruth Lilly (Editor) (1982). Plein Air Painters of California: The Southland. Irvine, Calif.: Westphal Publishing. ISBN 0-9610520-0-7.
• Peterson, Brian H. (Editor) (2002). Pennsylvania Impressionism. Philadelphia: James A. Michener Art Museum and University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-3700-5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Impressionism

The Impressionist style of painting developed in the late nineteenth century in France. Although the Impressionist movement did not exclusively consist of French artists, it did start in France and the French painters are among the most well-known. Several earlier artistic movements, such as Classicism and Realism, influenced the Impressionist painters. In 1855, a World Fair was held in Paris, and art was given significant attention. This contributed to Paris’ reputation as the center of the art world and the place to be for aspiring painters, such as the group that would come to be known as the Impressionists.

The Académie Suisse, founded and run by the painter Charles Suisse, provided the venue which inspired Impressionism’s founding artists. It was here that Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin and Cézanne first came to know each other. Despite the obvious advantage of providing free models, the Académie was important for another reason:  it provided  the place and opportunity for aspiring artists to air new and controversial ideas about painting. Each year the Académie sponsored an exhibition where its members, often the professors themselves, judged entries. It was the restrictive nature of the judges, preferring established “accepted art,” that prompted Monet and some other painters to exhibit their works separately in the studio of the photographer, Nadar. This historic exhibition, held in 1874, included Monet’s famousImpression: Sunrise (1872), which is generally thought to have prompted the naming of the whole genre.

The Impressionists focused on capturing the overall impression of a scene through effects produced by using light and color in various ways. The principal French Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot,Armand Guillaumin,  Frédéric Bazille, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne.  The established painterÉdouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873. http://www.uncg.edu/rom/courses/common/impressionism.htm

The term, first used sarcastically, was derived in part from the title of a painting, Impression, Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan-Claude Monet, Paris), by Claude Monet. In 1874 he exhibited the work independently of the official Salon in Paris, along with artists such as Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro. Impressionism subsequently became widely used to describe the style of painting practiced by these artists, who exhibited together eight times until 1886.

The impressionists usually worked rapidly, in front of their subjects, in open air rather than in a studio. They took full advantage of the technical advances being made in the manufacture of artists’ pigments, such as new cadmium pigments. Their characteristic broken or flickering brushwork was particularly effective in capturing the fleeting quality of light. The impressionists tended to be attracted to contemporary subjects, namely aspects of modern urban life and suburban landscapes.

Several American painters, such as Mary Cassatt, Willard Leroy Metcalf, and Childe Hassam, also worked in the impressionist style in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.