The best American Impressionist painters

Everyone knows the French impressionists: Claude Monet, August Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and (even though she was born in Pittsburgh) Mary Cassatt.

They’re famous — but what about the Americans? This art museum junkie thought he’d make a modest list of the ten American impressionists whose paintings he has enjoyed the most.

Hassam's "The Breakfast Room," at the Worcester Art Museum

1. Childe Hassam. We begin with the best-known American impressionist, Childe Hassam, who despite his exotic-sounding name was from an old Boston family. Hassam was a prolific worker, and Emsworth has seen more of his work than of any other American impressionist. Most American museums have at least one Hassam. In fact, he’s is the only American impressionist whose work we’ve ever seen in a major retrospective exhibition (it was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the summer of 2004).

Hassam's "Rainy Day, Fifth Avenue," at the University of Princeton Art Museum

In our humble view, the quality of Hassam’s paintings is decidedly mixed. We Rochesterians have a piece by Hassam at the Memorial Art Gallery, but it’s a large, wide, mural-size, classically-flavored landscape without a great deal of appeal.

Personally, we blame the facile Hassam as much as anyone for the quickly painted, low-quality, “impressionistic” paintings you see at “starving artist” markets. He made it look as if there was nothing to it — and sometimes there wasn’t much. But the best of his material has a lot of charm.

2. Theodore Robinson. Hassam may have the cringe-making nickname “the American Monet”, but Theodore Robinson actually painted with Monet in Giverny, France. This pleasing New England scene, painted in 1894 and entitled Low Tide, was just acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Emsworth noted several Robinson pictures in the collection of the Terra Museum in this post last summer.

3. Edmund C. Tarbell. Don’t tell us that the best of Tarbell’s paintings don’t afford as much pleasure as a fine Monet or Degas. His dazzling Mother and Child in a Boat makes our point. We think it’s the best of the American impressionist paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the city where Tarbell lived and worked.

4. Willard Metcalf. We have so gotten to enjoy the landscapes of Willard Metcalf that we had difficulty choosing a representative picture. One of the superb winter snow pictures that made his reputation? Or one of his colorful autumn pictures, like The Golden Carnival at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery? This 1909 picture, Icebound, belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.

5. Daniel Garber. As we noted in an earlier post about our visit to the Michener Art Museum (in southeastern Pennsylvania), which has several superb Garbers, his paintings tend to have a magical, mystical quality about them.

But there is nothing at all cartoonish about Garber’s paintings, though some of them remind us vaguely of the cinematography in Sleeping Beauty. This large, marvelous landscape, entitled Tohickon, belongs to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., which has just recently (as of fall 2009) put it on display in the Grand Salon of the Renwick Gallery.

6. Philip Leslie Hale. If this was the only painting he’d done, we’d still include the Boston impressionist Philip Leslie Hale on our list. We nominate The Crimson Rambler, a 1908 painting that is in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as one of the very finest of all American impressionist paintings. This image doesn’t do it justice.

Bits of trivia: Philip Leslie Hale was the son of the noted preacher Edward Everett Hale. And his wife Lilian Westcott Hale was also a well-known painter; we saw a couple of of her paintings at a traveling exhibition here in Rochester last spring. Her picture Home Lessons was noted in this Emsworth post..

7. William Glackens. The great American collector Albert Barnes, who amassed the finest collection of Renoirs and Cezannes in the world, unfortunately didn’t think much of his own country’s artists. His friend William Glackens was practically the only American impressionist Barnes cared for, and if you make your way out to the ritzy Philadelphia suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania to visit the Barnes Foundation, you’ll find Glackens sharing the walls with Renoir, Seurat, and Picasso. (We’ve read that Barnes bought several Ernest Lawsons, but he must have sold them, because we don’t remember seeing any at the Barnes.)

The Renoir-like painting shown above, Bathing at Bellport, is at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Clearly Glackens studied Renoir closely. No doubt that’s one of the reasons Barnes thought so well of Glackens; Barnes thought every aspiring artist should study Renoir. I enjoyed this blogger’s excellent illustrated note on Glackens’s paintings of Washington Square, in Manhattan.

8. Ernest Lawson. Like Vincent van Gogh, Lawson slathered paint onto his canvases pretty freely, and to marvelous effect. We’ve noticed that a lot of his paintings show a broad landscape through a screen of trees in the foreground, like this painting, Spring Tapestry, which is in Connecticut at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

9. Colin Campbell Cooper. Cooper’s best-known pictures are urban landscapes set in Philly or New York City.  In the 1920s he moved to California and painted there.  But the finest Cooper we’ve ever seen, Main Street Bridge, Rochester, is right here in Rochester. We walk across the Genesee River all the time over this very bridge.

Cooper’s picture was painted in 1908. Till the 1960s, there were still buildings right on the bridge itself, on both sides. There aren’t any buildings on the bridge now; you can see the river as you drive or walk across. This is our favorite impressionist painting at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery.

10. Frederick Carl Frieseke.. Frieseke’s adventures in color took him as far past other American impressionists like Edmund Tarbell and Willard Metcalf as French post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard’s wildly successful experiments (we love Bonnard) took him past Monet and Sisley. This picture, The Bird Cage, can be seen at the New Britain Museum of American Art; the gift shop there will sell you a refrigerator magnet with the image.

The Pennsylvanian Edward R. Redfield's "The Brook at Carversville," at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art

We had trouble limiting our list to ten painters; it was hard to leave off Edward W. Redfield, one of our very favorites (see this post), from the list. (Mary Cassatt worked in Europe for virtually her entire career, so we omitted her.) A longer list of famous American impressionists would include Cecilia Beaux, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Guy Wiggins, Elmer Schofield, Lilian Westcott Hale, Frank Weston Benson, Robert Reid, and Dennis Miller Bunker.

Why do they squirrel all that art away?

Fernand Leger: The Smokers

How often has it happened that Emsworth has made his way to the doors of a notable art museum, far from his Rochester home, only to find that its famed collection is not being exhibited?

We speak not of cases in which a museum is closed for renovations (will the Cleveland Museum of Art ever reopen?), but of museums that stubbornly choose to display anything and everything in their galleries other than their own paintings and sculptures.

(For example, Fernand Leger’s The Smokers, owned by the Guggenheim and one of the cubist painter’s masterpieces, was decidedly not on display during a recent visit by Emsworth.)

Nothing is more frustrating to art museum junkies like Emsworth. Let us catalog the chief culprits:

Max Beckmann: Paris Society

1. The Guggenheim Museum (Fifth Avenue, Manhattan). The most egregious by a landslide. The Guggenheim owns one of the finest collections of modern art anywhere — dazzling works by Picasso, Mondrian, Modigliani, Franz Marc, and Ernest Kirchner. And what Kandinskys!

Yet for years, disappointment has awaited the modern art lover who hoped to see more than a few of these works when in New York City. (Max Beckmann’s Paris Society, owned by the Guggenheim, was not on display during a recent visit by Emsworth.)

Emsworth took another chance on the Guggenheim again just a couple of weeks ago. You know (the ticket-seller asked me) that it’s mostly just photographs right now, don’t you? I did know it, having seen a poster announcement when I finally entered the building. It wasn’t what I came for, but I’d waited so long in line that I went in anyway.

By my actual count, the Guggenheim was exhibiting only eleven works of art from its collection: two paintings by Franz Marc, two by Chagall, one each by Kirchner and Jawlensky, and five early Kandinskys. Not even the Guggenheim’s Thannhauser collection was on display.

We didn’t want to waste our money, so we visited the photography exhibit, a retrospective of Catherine Opie. She was a new artist for us, and we can report that she has a keen eye for urban landscape and also an interest in what the exhibit termed “queer culture.” We rolled our eyes at a pretentious description of a group of photos as “Opie’s most complex investigation of community to date” and wished there had been more Kandinskys to see.

Frederick Carl Frieseke:Hollyhocks

2. National Academy of Design (also on Fifth Avenue, just north of the Guggenheim). The crimes of the management here are remarkable.

No chance of seeing either Frederick Carl Frieseke’s Hollyhocks or Asher Durand’s The Evening of Life at the National Academy of Design, which squirrels them away in storage somewhere.

We walked into the Fifth Avenue mansion which the National Academy occupies, bought our ticket, and were then told that there was nothing to see but exhibits of George Tooker and Henry Blakelock in galleries on the fifth floor.

Asher Durand: The Evening of Life

But in a nearby atrium a large plaque gave the history of the institution and informed me that the National Academy has a collection of more than 3,000 works of American art from the 19th and 20th centuries, including works from the Hudson River School, the tonalists, the American impressionists, the Ashcan painters, and the modernists. Our heart quickened; surely the ticket man was mistaken.

I spent some time in the exhibits (which, in fairness, were excellent, especially the Tooker), and when I saw the ticket seller again, I asked him again about the 3,000 pieces of art. You might ask this lady about it, he said — she’s the director.

I turned and intercepted a woman walking by, who interrupted my question to say that the Academy now actually had over 5,000 works. They weren’t ordinarily displayed, she told me, in a tone that suggested she was weary of the question. Wasn’t it a shame, I asked, that such a fine collection should be kept in storage? Well, she said, next year sometime we’re going to make a point of having at least some of the collection on display.

Total number of works of art from the National Academy’s permanent collection on display? Two, that I counted — a Tooker and a Blakelock. They were part of the exhibits.

Hopper: Ground Swell

3. The Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., just north of the White House). The Corcoran has a fine, comprehensive collection of both American and European art. At least, we think so. For in perhaps half a dozen hopeful visits to the Corcoran over the last 25 years, we’ve seen only bits and pieces of it. (For example, Edward Hopper’s Ground Swell. We’ve never seen it at the Corcoran.)

As far as we can tell, there aren’t any galleries in the Corcoran regularly dedicated to its permanent collection. The management seems to think that it’s enough, every now and then, for it to cobble together an “exhibition” of works from the permanent collection. There are a couple such exhibits there now. But one never gets a sense of the entire collection.

The Corcoran is big on high-profile exhibits like the retrospective of Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, that we ran into last year, or of the glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, which amazed us a while back. But shows like that are unsatisfactory when you can’t wander through the rest of the museum and put them in context with other art.

Alfred Sisley:The Loing at Saint Mammes

4. The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). At times we’ve actually been a card-carrying member of the MFA, so we feel fully justified in complaining that a good part of its magnificent collection of European impressionists hasn’t been seen in Boston for years, like Alfred Sisley’s The Loing at Saint Mammes. At least, we never see them when we’re there. Our frustration is compounded by our strong suspicion that the MFA has, in fact, been selling its members and visitors short by renting out the Sisley and other masterpieces to a casino in Las Vegas.

Max Weber: Chinese Restaurant

5. The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City). The Whitney has 12,000 works. It could easily fill up a couple of floors of galleries with its permanent collection, as the Museum of Modern Art does. (Your chances of seeing Max Weber’s 1915 cubist masterpiece, Chinese Restaurant at the Whitney, which owns it? Slim.)

But no. I’ve virtually given up visiting the Whitney, even though it has many of my favorite paintings, because it’s been so long since I’ve seen more than two or three galleries worth of its permanent collection. And as with many art museums, it’s virtually impossible to get a sense, from visiting its website, how much of the permanent collection can actually be seen at any given time.

(October 30, 2008)

American Impressionists in Old Lyme, Connecticut

Willard Metcalf's "May Night"

What art lover can get enough of the impressionists? Not Emsworth, certainly, despite his vow to partake of more solid fare, and so last weekend found us in Old Lyme, Connecticut treating ourselves to a second generous helping of American impressionists this summer. (The first was here in Rochester, with pictures from the Phillips Collection. See my earlier post.)

Old Lyme is home to the Florence Griswold Museum, the only museum I know of devoted solely to American impressionism. For a decade or two, beginning around 1900, a number of painters, including Childe Hassam and Willard Metcalf, came each summer to stay at Florence Griswold’s boarding house and to paint in the congenial and picturesque surroundings of Old Lyme. Metcalf depicted its classy facade in one of his best-known paintings, May Night, seen above. (The place is not nearly as mansion-like as Metcalf’s picture suggests!)

The boarding house is no longer the home of an art colony, but instead a small, unpretentious museum. The gardens have been nicely restored, a new gallery building (sadly devoid of architectural interest) was erected several years ago, and a good (though narrowly focused) art collection has been assembled.

Theodore Robinson's "The Wedding March"

The show that now fills the new gallery spaces (through July 27, 2008) consists of American impressionist paintings from the Terra Foundation. These were painted by Americans working from about 1885 and into the 1920s in Giverny, of all places, the French town where Claude Monet lived and tended his celebrated garden with its Japanese footbridge and lily pond.

These young Americans must have been quite a nuisance to Monet and his family. One of them, Theodore Butler, succeeded in marrying Monet’s step-daughter, Suzanne Hoschede, an event memorialized in Theodore Robinson’s painting The Wedding March, which is part of this show. Several of Butler’s own paintings, which did not especially appeal to us, were also on display. Willard Metcalf, who collected birds’ eggs (shown as part of this exhibit!), managed to get himself hired by Monet to teach botany to his son and stepson.

Still another American, John Leslie Breck, apparently tried and failed to marry another stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschede. Breck surely did his best to curry favor with the girl’s stepfather; he joined Monet in painting those tiresome haystacks. (The Breck picture shown to the left is titled Morning Fog and Sun.) One wall of the galleries was wasted on a dozen small haystack studies by Breck.

Breck's "Autumn, Giverny (The New Moon)"

But we did enjoy a large and impressive pastoral landscape by Breck entitled Autumn, Giverny (The New Moon), which shows the influence of Barbizon painters Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton — although everyone in our party agreed that Breck had devoted too much of the canvas to the foreground.

Ernest Lawson's "Harlem Valley, Winter"

The show in Old Lyme has a satisfying set of works by Theodore Robinson, some of which brought to mind paintings by Ernest Lawson we had recently seen in the exhibit from the Phillips Collection in Rochester. (For Emsworth’s reflections on that exhibit, see this post.) For example, Lawson had a habit of putting bare tree limbs in the foreground of a landscape (see above) as a sort of screen for the rest of the painting. Robinson’s earlier painting, Winter Landscape, done in 1889, used the same device.

Lawson’s work is characterized overall by the use of thickly applied, jewel-tone paints. But Theodore Robinson apparently used this technique first, as evidenced by my favorite of the Robinson pictures in this show, Pere Trognon and His Daughter at the Bridge.

Theodore Robinson's "Pere Trognon and His Daughter at the Bridge"

The highlight of the show for me was a wall of several paintings by my favorite American impressionist, the bold colorist Carl Frieseke, who produced his best work in the second and third decades of the twentieth century while Matisse and Picasso were taking modern art in quite different directions. In Frieseke’s Lady in a Garden, the stripes on the lady’s dress become indistinguishable from the reeds through in which she is standing; she becomes one with cultivated nature.

Carl Frieseke's "Lady in a Garden"

From Rochester, the Florence Griswold Museum is not exactly a day trip, but it’s easy to find once you’re in New England anyway. Old Lyme is just off Interstate 95, about thirty miles east of New Haven.

For an art museum junkie who cares about American art, and Emsworth stands at the front of that line, the Florence Griswold Museum is worthy of regular visits for its excellent permanent collection. Most of that collection is, unfortunately, in storage when the museum has a traveling exhibition like the present one from the Terra Foundation occupying its new exhibition space.

But highlights of the collection, including this quintessentially impressionistic work by Childe Hassam, can be seen in the first- and second-floor rooms of the old boarding house. A particularly pleasing painting by William Chadwick shows the veranda of the boarding house as it was when Chadwick, Hassam, and the others were working there a hundred years ago. Amusingly, the panels of the kitchen cupboards were all painted by the denizens of the art colony back in the day.
(July 15, 2008)

See Emsworth’s post on another small but fine art museum whose collection focuses on the American Impressionists: The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. It’s at this post.

And check out some of the American impressionists, including Willard Metcalf and Childe Hassam, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. See my recent post.