Americans at large: Impressionism across the Atlantic

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Dismissed for many years as lacking the ‘grit’ of French Impressionism, the American version is now being re-evaluated. Patricia Andrew reports on the only UK showing of an important exhibition

How many people in Britain know the names of the American artists Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, Edmund C.Tarbell, Dennis Miller Bunker or John Henry Twachtman? These painters are known as American Impressionists, though the appropriateness of the term can be debated, for like so many artists their work falls into differing categories of art history, depending on the selection of their oeuvre and the context of study.

Now showing at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, ‘American Impressionism: A New Vision’ also includes names better-known in this country: the French painters Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas, and their American followers Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. The show demonstrates how American painters adopted, and adapted, French Impressionism, and the juxtaposition of familiar and unfamiliar artists makes it particularly interesting. The comparisons and contrasts are fascinating too: the work of both the original Impressionists and their American followers is frequently very close in technical terms, but the Americans often chose very different subject matter, resulting in a distinctive body of work.

Only one American, Mary Cassatt, ever actually exhibited with the French Impressionists; she participated in four of their shows between 1879 and 1886. In fact, many Americans in Europe were hardly enamoured of Impressionism when it first appeared, for they had come to study more traditional art at the formal art schools.

Theodore Robinson was one of the first to go to Giverny, the village in which Monet had settled (his celebrated water-lily compositions were based on his garden there). The two artists became friends, and Robinson showed his Giverny paintings on his return home. Sargent and Whistler – painters whose artistic nationality tends to be claimed by more than one country – are not generally regarded as Impressionists. Nonetheless, one has only to look at Sargent’s painting of Monet at his easel in 1885 to see the influence:  his choice of colour, his handling of paint and his compositions show clear debts to French Impressionism again and again.

Back in America, artists influenced by French Impressionism tended to produce sunny, idealistic images featuring elegant people enjoying leisured lifestyles. When Edmund Tarbell’s In the Orchard (1891) was exhibited in Chicago in 1893, it established the artist as a leader of Impressionism in America, and also set the tone in terms of subject-matter – ‘beautifully sound and sweet in color, splendid in its light and warmth’ wrote one critic. He welcomed the image as a picture of an American ideal. Indeed, so many – all too many, some might say – of these American paintings show sunlit scenes of beautiful women and children, often dressed in white, busy only with gentle exercise in friendly countryside or neat city parks populated entirely by the upper-middle classes. Unlike the work of the French Impressionists, there is scant reference to the reality of dirty streets, poor people or any mix of social classes; it is entirely unthreatening and reassuring. One can see why so much of it fell out of favour in the 20th century, consigned to basements in so many American museums.

Some of the most striking images in the show are those concentrating on small, local subjects. Dennis Miller Bunker produced a series of deceptively simple, highly-coloured studies of the American countryside, such as the Roadside Cottage (1889) with its dramatic shafts of sunlight beating down on a small white building with bright red chimneys;  or his The Pool, Medfield (1889) which shows a simple pool and steam in a field, but created with such strong brushstrokes and richness of colour that it positively bursts with life.

 The one artist whose work stands out as a contrast here is John Henry Twatchman, who painted scenes of snow and mist in a very restrained whitish palette, imparting a sense of eeriness, loneliness, melancholy and mystery.

All of this makes for an exhibition that is extremely beautiful, the shimmering whitenesses and bright colours glowing against the grey and blue walls of the gallery rooms, connected by a balcony corridor used to advantage for displaying the biographies of each artist.

This show is a multi-organizational effort by the musée des impressionnismes Giverny, the National Galleries of Scotland and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, with the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art. Its only UK showing is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) until 19 October.

The catalogue, American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1900, edited by Katherine Bourguignon, with essays by Richard Brettell, Frances Fowle and Katherine Bourguignon is published by Editions Hazan 2014  and distributed by Yale University Press 2014. 160pp. c.120 colour illus. ISBN978-1-906270-70-4