The American Impressionists, especially those represented by the exhibition conceived and introduced last summer at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and now touring the United States, are painters whose time has come - again. They flourished in the late nineteenth century, their success and attention related to their counterparts (and frequent colleagues and mentors) in France. But as the Post-Impressionists and Modernists of the early twentieth century came on the scene - their entrance heralded dramatically by the controversial 1913 New York Armory Show - the American Impressionists, led by the Boston School, lost favor among the more avant-grade and progressive elements of the art world.
Happily, for a major period in American art this is no longer the case. American Impressionists, while as sensitive to feeling, color, and light as the Europeans, were also keenly respectful of the traditional techniques and disciplines of Vermeer, Velasquez, Millet, and Monet. This respect for tradition brought about a cooling of interest during the tumult of modernist experimentation that gripped public imagination, centering in New York, from the 1920s on. A reevaluation of tastes, standards, and interests began to emerge in the 1960s, however, resulting in renewed interest in the American Impressionists, especially during the last ten years.
For these talented men and women who for so long were prophets without honor in their own country, the exhibition is a kind of homecoming. The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870-1930, has brought together core members of a major period in American art. It was an especially happy homecoming at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, where these painters were first established more than a century ago in the city that gave their movement its name. This is where this current exhibition was researched, assembled, and mounted, by the dedicated and perceptive assistant curator of American painting Trevor Fairbrother, whose field of expertise is American Impressionism. In Boston last summer, where The Bostonians made its debut, the exhibition broke attendance records and heralded the renaissance of American Impressionist painting.
Center of Art
The American Impressionist movement began in Boston in the 1870s. Boston had been the center of American art from pre-Revolutionary and colonial times to the early nineteenth century, when John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart launched American portraiture from that city. In the late 1850s, when William Morris Hunt returned to Boston after studying in Europe with Jean Francois Millet, leader of the Barbizon School, he brought with him a new, progressive taste in art. Hunt became a leading art teacher in Boston as well as a major influence on artistic tastes. He prepared the way for the founding of the Boston Museum School and introduced Impressionism to America. Through his influence, Boston became the center of American Impressionism, and many private collectors bought Impressionist paintings that formed the foundation of the extensive Boston Museum of Fine Arts collection. That Hunt himself narrowly missed being a first-rate painter in no way diminishes the importance of his influence.
What distinguished the new Impressionism was the looseness of its visible brushwork - as opposed to the tight, minute detail of the Hudson River School - and its suggestiveness of detail, striking emotional colors, and brilliant quality of light. What
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