American Impressionism

Three Sisters by Edmund Tarbell, courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum

AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM

In the first half of the 19th century, any American artist who wanted artistic training in Europe usually went to London, but as the century progressed, Germany and France became the choice of those looking for cutting edge ideas. By the time of our Civil War, the roots of Impressionism had started to take root in Paris. Most of the artists involved in the movement struggled mightily against poverty and, if you look closely, you can see the tarnish in between the dabs of bright colors.
The first Americans to see this new French Impressionistic style were deeply offended by it’s artistic radicalism and lack of form. At the same time, there were American artists who supported the movement, but they were all expatriates, living in Paris and London. In particular, Edgar Degas’ friend, Mary Cassatt, promoted the new style and encouraged her rich friends to buy up the work in the same way her father sold undervalued stock. But it wouldn’t be until noted artist, William Merritt Chase, started to paint in the French style and encouraged others to do so, that the style finally found favor in America. Chase set up an artists’ colony on what was still rural Long Island and other artists’ followed suit, along the Northeast shoreline.
While French Impressionism was deeply rooted in the economic struggles of the artists and their lives in Paris, in America, Impressionism became the new art of the wealthy and the upper middle class. While not all of the artists involved with the American Impressionist movement were well off, Almost all of the major figures managed to spend time in Europe studying in the museums, talking to continental artists and generally looking at Europe through the eyes of radical painters.
Both America and France where struggling to come to grips with the Industrial Revolution, but while France understood that industry would not solve all of it’s problems, America had an incredibly rosy view of the money that poured into the US and this hopeful belief is present almost all of the works of the American Impressionists.
Interestingly, of all of the French painters, it is Claude Monet who seems to have had the greatest influence on the styles of the American Impressionists. John Twachtman, Childe Hassam and Edmund Tarbell all reflect Monet’s style or palette. The scientific but colorful palette that Monet used shows in their brilliant green shrubbery, summertime blue skies, and bright red flowers, as does the constant appearance of the white summer dresses that the women then wore.
By the time that Impressionism appeared in America, it was already being passed over by Post Impressionism in the radical art circles of Europe and it wouldn’t be until the appearance of the Ashcan School before the social realism of Monet’s train stations and Pissarro’s hay harvest would replace the sunny idealism of America’s version of Impressionism.

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