Beginning in the 1870s, American artists traveling in Europe encountered a group of modern painters known today as the Impressionists. Here was a style that gave visual form to America’s principles of unity in diversity and whose raw, spontaneous translation of experience into paint exemplified the youthful innocence of American culture. In a New Light: American Impressionism 1870–1940 explores both the global dissemination of Impressionism and its translation into an American visual language. Impressionism transformed landscape painting in the nation, and the exhibition gives insight into the changing nature of American art through its five thematic sections.
Pathways to Impressionism
This section focuses on artists from the Hudson and Barbizon schools of the late nineteenth century, including Albert Bierstadt, Ransome Gillet Holdredge, William Trost Richards, William Morris Hunt, George Inness and John Carleton Wiggins, along with Tonalist Charles Warren Eaten.
A Global Style
Works in this section highlight artists shaped by French Impressionism, including Lawton Silas Parker, Lila Cabot Perry and Alson Clark, along with those inspired by English Impressionism, including John Noble Barlow and Walter Elmer Schofield. Also included are works by Norwegian-born Jonas Lie, and by printmakers Arthur Wesley Dow and Joseph Raphael.
Painting the Local
Artists abound from local regional colonies. Old Lyme and Cos Cob, Connecticut, are represented in this section of the exhibition by Wilson Irvine, George M. Bruestle, Charles Ebert and Bruce Crane, while Arthur Clifton Goodwin, John Joseph Enneking and Alson Clark embody the Boston School. Other artists from the Northeast, including Gloucester, Rockport and the North Shore, include Philip Little, John Sloan and Gifford Beal. From Kennebunkport comes Abbott Fuller Graves, and from New Hope, Daniel Garber.
Artists hailing from the Midwest include James Jeffrey Grant and Karl Buehr. From the Southwest—most notably the Taos Society of Artists—are works by such esteemed artists as Ernest Blumenschein, Joseph Henry Sharp, Edgar Alwin Payne, Joseph Henry Sharp and Oscar E. Berninghaus. Artists from California and the Pacific Northwest, including Sydney J. Yard, Edward Potthast and Armin Carl Hansen, are also featured.
Forever Young
Despite upheavals in the United States, Impressionism could picture a national culture with a past that was still young. This nostalgia is represented in the exhibition by Childe Hassam, George Wesley Bellows, Guy Gertrude Fiske and Gerrit A. Beneker.
Out of Many, One
The beginnings of the transition from Impressionism into modern abstraction. Artists include Gifford Beal, Ernest Lawson, Leonard Ochtman, Emile Gruppe, Frank Bicknell, John Joseph Enneking and Birger Sandzén.
