Sunday will never be the same

Tompkins H Matteson's 1860 picture, Rip Van Winkle's Return

Now we know how Rip Van Winkle felt. Emsworth has just retired from a long stint as a church musician in a small, mainline congregation where things changed very little during his 16 years of service. Emerging this fall as if from a long sleep, he has found an evangelical church scene that he hardly recognizes.

Yes, we’ve been church-shopping. Freed from Sunday morning duties, and keeping out of the way of our successor at our old church, we’ve been visiting potential new church homes.

Our goal is simple: a congregation somewhere around Rochester where we can warm a back pew in well-deserved obscurity — a haven of rest where someday Emsworth might be able to hear “let us pray” without feeling as if he should get up and slide onto the organ bench.

The American impressionist Childe Hassam's painting, Church at Old Lyme. Classic churches on the town square are historical relics now.

Going to church without any responsibilities! That’s what we want. Being able to sing parts during the hymns!  The luxury of actually paying attention to the Scripture reading, instead of using the time to check our tie and fly and to sneak one last look at the beginning of the choir anthem to think about the tempo!

We know now what a fantasy that all was. A back pew?  Hah!  Most of the new churches don’t even have pews anymore. They don’t even have “sanctuaries,” just stadium-style auditoriums with gently reclining, consumer-friendly padded seats.

It's unlikely that Emsworth will ever sing "The church in the wildwood" in church again

Or hymnals either.  They don’t even sing hymns anymore, unless they slip a verse of one in as part of a medley with a contemporary Christian song that half the congregation doesn’t know. 

Scripture reading?  Hah!  Several of the churches we visited didn’t even have a part of the service devoted to reading Scripture (notwithstanding our Lord’s example (Luke 4:16-20)).

We would taken some satisfaction seeing someone else fretting over his choir.  But where have the choirs gone?  We haven’t heard one since we gave our choir a final cut-off last June.  Nothing but worship bands, and soloists with pre-recorded accompaniments.   The churches we visited were surely big enough to have choirs every Sunday – all at least five times larger than our former haunt.  But they don’t. 

St. Paul's Cathedral in London

At least we won’t have to worry about ties anymore.  The last two Sundays, at two different churches, no more than half a dozen men besides Emsworth sported coats and ties.  And the other men had lapped us by at least 15 years. We won’t miss ties.

No reason not to name names. Here are some of the Rochester-area churches we’ve visited over the last several months, some more than once: Hope Lutheran Church, Browncroft Community Church, North Baptist Church, Open Door Baptist Church, First Bible Baptist Church, and Pearce Memorial Free Methodist Church. Each one soundly evangelical, each prospering nicely in its own way (with two or three different Sunday morning services), each focused on getting bigger, each with a full line of products in the form of women’s Bible studies, home fellowship groups, and so on, and each obsessed with offering products that are fully contemporary and consumer-friendly. Most even have coffee shops; nothing has been more jarring about the “new churches” than seeing coffee and pastries sold inside the Lord’s house. Our parents, who took the fourth commandment very seriously indeed, would have been appalled.

The architecture of the Open Door Baptist Church will not be confused with St. Paul's Cathedral.

We started counting the references to contemporary pop culture in the pastors’ sermons. One pastor alluded to two different movies and a vintage TV show in his message. Another message, in which Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, and the chain of Ikea stores were all mentioned, actually began with the music leader’s pounding out the opening riffs of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on the piano. 

Some of these churches try to tap different components of the market by having both “contemporary” and “traditional” services on Sunday morning.  (We were especially amused by Hope Lutheran’s Coca-Cola-like name for its traditional service: “Classic Hope.”)  The main difference, as we take it, is that contemporary services use worship bands to lead congregational singing. That’s assuming, of course, that leading people in singing is really their goal. Truth is that one can almost never actually hear any congregational singing over the bands. 

Mostly, the people don’t even try to sing.  They don’t know the songs, whose syncopated rhythms are a lot more complicated than, say, “Onward Christian Soldiers.” And the people don’t have any music to look at to see how the melody goes — just lyrics up on projection screens.

Despite these disappointments, there weren’t any of these churches we couldn’t settle down in. We heard thoughtful, well-delivered messages from pastors (in several cases assistant pastors) at each church on the core subject of becoming better Christians. (Tom Hauser, at Open Door Baptist, gets our vote as the most gifted natural speaker we’ve heard in a while.) All these churches are sadly committed to “contemporary Christian music” (the style is 1980s soft rock, with bland, theologically fuzzy lyrics — think Bryan Adams and Toto); nevertheless, the quality of the musicianship was high wherever we went. (The worship band at North Baptist, composed almost entirely of acoustic instruments, gets our nod as having both the best overall sound and the tightest arrangements.)

Still, we can’t help regretting intensely what’s been lost in the new evangelical and updated churches, especially with church music. The hymnody of the last 250 years, some of it very good, has all been abandoned. The gospel songs of the first part of the twentieth century that we grew up with — some of them weren’t that good, perhaps, but at any rate they aren’t even on the radar anymore. So many Christians who will never sing “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” or “In Shady Green Pastures”! Small congregations are already becoming “collateral damage” of the new-style churches. Congregations that fail to achieve a certain critical mass won’t have the resources to fill out contemporary worship bands, or to build worship spaces big enough to contain the sound.

As Spanky MacFarland used to sing, back in the day:

Sunday will never be the same
I’ve lost my Sunday song — it’ll not be back again

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.

American art in Canajoharie: the Arkell Museum

Of all the art museums we visit, the Canajoharie Art Museum is the most unlikely. There’s not much to it, and it’s in the middle of nowhere (about half an hour west of Albany).

What attracts us to this upstate New York museum is a small but very creditable collection of American paintings from about 1860 to 1940: American impressionists, Ashcan artists, and regionalists. And anyone who cares for Winslow Homer at all must go to Canajoharie.

The Homers at the Arkell Museum include "Watching the Breakers"

This was the first time we’d been back since the museum got a shiny new addition a year or two ago. The addition seems to allow for a little more gallery space.  The museum seems to have a new name, too — but we’re not quite sure what it is. The sign over the post in front still says “Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery” (see above), but a big sign on the side of the building now also says “Arkell Museum” in large letters, with “Canajoharie Library” getting second billing. Its website now calls it “The Arkell Museum at Canajoharie,” which for some reason reminds us of the ridiculously named Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Theodore Robinson's "Josephine in the Garden" was painted in 1890 in Monet's garden in Giverny, France -- one of our favorites in the Arkell Museum collection.

If the name “Canajoharie” seems vaguely familiar, it could be because you’ve noticed it on the signs for New York State Thruway Exit 29. You pass it on your way to Albany from Rochester or Syracuse. If you know where to look, you can see the museum building from the Thruway itself.

The location of the museum still leaves a lot to be desired. It shares its facility with the local library, and the same lady who sells you a $7 ticket to the museum also checks out library books. The museum isn’t located in a semi-glamorous tourist destination like the Feminore Art Museum in Cooperstown, about 40 miles west, or in an upscale residential neighborhood like the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, a hundred miles east. Instead, it’s right across the street from a baby-food factory. (The Arkell family, founders of the museum, owned the Beech-Nut company, makers of chewing gum and baby food.)  The town of Canajoharie itself is the sort of slowly decaying upstate New York community that Richard Russo sets his novels in (like Empire Falls).

Edmund Tarbell: "Girl Crocheting"

Still, it’s easy to get to — only about five blocks from the Thruway exit. A visit to the Canajoharie Art Museum is a pleasant and convenient diversion if you’re on a road trip, as we were a week and half ago.

The group of American impressionists at the Arkell Museum is especially rewarding. By a nose, our favorite was a 1904 painting by Edmund Tarbell called “Girl Crocheting,” a gentle, golden interior with hints of Vermeer and de Hooch. We think it’s as fine a Tarbell as we’ve seen. The wife of our bosom, on the other hand, would have chosen Childe Hassam’s “Provincetown” (shown here) a richly worked canvas that we agreed was among his finest. The collection also includes impressionist paintings by Willard Metcalf, Edward Redfield, Edward Lawson, John Twachtman, and William Glackens. We were taken with a remarkably bright snow scene by Walter Launt Palmer, a new artist to us. We couldn’t find an image of his Arkell Museum painting, but you can get an idea of its light effects from a couple of his winter scenes in this excellent blog post about Palmer by Matthew D. Innis.

The Ashcan painter John Sloan is one of our very favorite American artists, and our heart was gladdened to see once again his lively 1917 painting “Gloucester Trolley.”  Remarkably, the Arkell Museum has two paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, both portraits from the 1920s (this one is “New England Postmaster,” painted in 1924). Although we are devoted to Benton, we liked even better a delightful painting by a lesser-known regionalist, Ogden Pleissner, whose works we have not often seen in museums. Pleissner’s 1939 painting “Circus Comes to Rawlius, Wyoming” (unfortunately we couldn’t find an image) shows the organized chaos of a traveling circus getting ready for a show — a circus tent, brightly colored caravans, and the rear ends of several elephants.

But what makes the Arkell Museum special is its collection of Winslow Homer. The museum has some six or seven Homer oil paintings (they weren’t all on display ten days ago), including the late marine shown toward the top of this post, and more than a dozen Homer watercolors.

Homer's "Home, Sweet Home," in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

As might be expected, the watercolors are exhibited sparingly, only once a year or so. We’ve seen them before, but missed them during our recent visit; we suppose the museum’s website will announce when they’ll be up again.  Of the Homer oil paintings, our favorite here is “Punishment for Intoxication,” which we think is one of the best of Homer’s Civil War paintings. It’s a Union Army camp scene; a soldier, holding a stick instead of his rifle, is standing in disgrace on a box, while another soldier paces nearby. We couldn’t find an image of “Punishment for Intoxication,” but it’s as richly detailed, and has the same atmosphere, as Homer’s poignant “Home, Sweet Home,” in the National Gallery of Art.

Better than nothing: American paintings in the stacks at the Met

Willard Metcalf's "The North Country," in storage at the Met

(October 11, 2008) Emsworth’s two previous visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art found the galleries of American art closed for renovations. On arriving for a visit last week, therefore, this art museum junkie prudently inquired first at the information desk. Yes, an elderly female cheerfully assured me, as she consulted a list, the American collection was now open.

I was misinformed. The entrances and stairs to the American galleries were still roped off. The rooms where usually hang the seascapes of Winslow Homer, the portraits of John Singer Sargent, and the American impressionists were closed.  So were the galleries of American genre paintings, the Ash Can school, and the Hudson River landscapes. (I see now (January 2009) that the renovations to the American art galleries aren’t scheduled to be completed until early 2011.)

And so was the grand, old-fashioned picture gallery that has Emanuel Leutze’s enormous Washington Crossing the Delaware and as many other nineteenth-century paintings as they can cram from floor to ceiling. (Where could they have put the Leutze during renovations, I wondered? How did they possibly get it out? It’s over 20 feet wide!)

My disappointment was great, for I had my mind set on American art. But then I remembered the stacks. I couldn’t tell you how to find them there in the Met, except that they’re somewhere in the northwest corner, not far from the big Egyptian temple. They’re actually called the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art.

In the stacks, for quite a few years, the Met has kept, ostensibly for “study” purposes but more likely out of a sense of guilt for squirreling away so much interesting art away from the public, a good number of the American paintings in its collection that aren’t currently being exhibited in the American galleries. (Right: Childe Hassam’s lush Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain, 1918, which I saw in the stacks.) The stacks consists of rows and rows of tall glass cases with locked doors, behind which they’ve hung paintings as closely together as possible on pegboards.

The viewing conditions are terrible. The stacks are only about five feet apart, and the glare on the glass from the ceiling lights is dreadful.  In no sense are the pictures displayed to advantage, and they aren’t in any particular order. Still, the stacks are better than nothing, especially while the American galleries are closed.

I’d spent enough time in them in years past to know that they usually contain (a) inferior examples from well-known American painters, (b) paintings in poor condition, and (c) paintings from schools that are out of vogue. But last week, the stacks included quite a few of the Met’s best-known American paintings, works that ordinarily would be on display. (Above, and fighting the glare: “Zeke’s House – Zeke’s Shop,” by American impressionist Daniel Garber)

Practically all the Homers were there, from his Civil War pictures to his late marine paintings. So were the Sargents — familiar large portraits and medium-sized landscapes — but not Sargent’s notorious Madame X, which was being exhibited in a place of honor several blocks away at the other end of the Met among the 19th-century European paintings.  (Another Sargent and several paintings by Thomas Eakins, James McNeill Whistler, and William Chase Merritt were in the same gallery with Madame X among the Europeans.) So were eight Mary Cassatts and nearly a dozen impressionist paintings by Childe Hassam (to the right: Hassam’s Celia Thaxter’s Garden).

I found a number of my old favorites in the glass cases.  There was the triptych by Thomas Waterman Wood, A Bit of War History, a masterpiece of 19th-century genre painting, which shows a black man first as an escaped slave, then as a soldier in the Union army, then, after the war, as a disabled veteran.  There was Thomas Anschutz’s A Rose, a stylized portrait of a pensive, seated woman in a red dress.  There was Worthington Whittredge’s The Camp Meeting, an unusual scene of a 19th-century revival meeting held on the shores of a river (the picture is dated 1874); an evangelist on a platform among the trees is speaking to a large crowd.  Himself a veteran of many camp meeting scenes, Emsworth felt right at home in Whittredge’s picture.

Not to mention the American impressionists! I wouldn’t have guessed the Met had so many Hassams, although most of them were probably up when the Met hosted the Childe Hassam retrospective several years ago. Down at the bottom of one of stacks, side by side, were two exceptionally fine Willard Metcalf paintings of wonderfully familiar (to Emsworth) scenes from upstate New York. (The Thawing Pool is to the right; The North Country is at the top of this post.) High up in another stack was Edmund C. Tarbell’s Across the Room, an 1889 painting that amuses me because of the way Tarbell imitated Edgar Degas in putting everything in one corner of a canvas and painting large expanses of floor. (Degas’s Dancers Practicing at the Bar, just below, is also at the Met.) Then there came a small surprise: an Ernest Lawson painting titled Harlem River that looked nearly identical to one of the finest Lawsons in the Phillips Collection. (See Emsworth’s comments on this and other Lawsons from the Phillips in this post.) Two other Lawsons in the stacks were not, I thought, his best.

I had never seen so many people in the stacks. I think probably most of them had wandered in by accident while searching for Homer’s The Gulf Stream or perhaps Frederick Church’s The Heart of the Andes. (I ran across the Church painting a little later elsewhere in the Met, in the middle of the Lehman Collection, as part of a modest, unadvertised exhibit of some of the Met’s large Hudson River School paintings.) I noticed a few empty spaces in the stacks, and as I continued to putter through through them, people from the curatorial staff arrived to unlock the glass doors and take a few paintings away. That looked promising; perhaps the re-opening of the American galleries was imminent.

UPDATE: In its description of the modest exhibit of large Hudson River School paintings, the Met’s website says that the museum’s “major reordering and upgrading of the American Wing paintings galleries” is scheduled for completion in early 2011. Two years away! Bah!

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.

American Impressionists at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery

(June 8, 2008) The Phillips Collection, an art museum in Washington, D.C., has once again sent a group of paintings out on tour, and for the next week or so they are here in Rochester at the Memorial Art Gallery.

The last time paintings from the Phillips Collection were here, several years ago, we got a group of abstract twentieth-century still lifes. This was the only occasion I can remember that a painting by Pablo Picasso has been shown in Rochester, but all in all, I don’t think Rochesterians were much impressed.

But now the Phillips has sent us a fine selection of its American impressionists, painted from about 1880 through 1925, and these seem to be better received by MAG visitors. At any rate, we like it, even though, in our pride, we like to think of ourselves as having advanced beyond the ever-popular impressionists in our appreciation of art.

Sisley's "Overcast Day at Saint Mammes"

The American impressionists have a reputation as second-rate imitators of the “real” impressionists, the French. But I think that is due more to our inferiority complex on matters cultural than to any marked differences in artistic quality. And, of course, the French themselves have never had much interest in art created outside France, Italy, or Spain. American museums are littered with Monets, Pissarros, and Sisleys (just above, a Sisley from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; below, a Monet that can be seen right here in Rochester), but the Musee d’Orsay has nothing by any American impressionist. (It does own Whistler’s Mother, but Whistler was neither an impressionist nor terribly American.)

The best paintings of the American impressionists match up pretty well with the French. It is true that impressionism originated in France and that the Americans learned from the French impressionist masters. But who thinks less of van Gogh or Cezanne because they studied with Pissarro? Most artists are influenced by somebody.

The best-known American impressionist is Childe Hassam, represented among these Phillips paintings by Washington Arch, Spring (1890), a scene in soft pastels set in lower Manhattan. The show also includes three paintings by another prominent American impressionist, John Twachtman, including Winter (1891), a snow scene painted almost entirely in light blues and grays.

"Home Lessons"

Hassam and Twachtman will remind you of Monet. On the other hand, the juicy summer colors and broader brushstrokes of William Glackens’s Bathers at Bellport show him as a disciple of Renoir, while Theodore Robinson’s Giverny reminds us both in subject matter and style of Pissarro’s mid-career paintings of country people and farm scenes. We were especially taken with two interior scenes: Lillian Westcott Hale’s Home Lessons, a picture of a young girl studying a globe (affinities with Renoir), and Helen Turner’s A Rainy Day, a picture of a woman with a bird in her bedroom (affinities with the French post-impressionists Pierre Bonnard and Edward Vuillard).

"Ice in the River"

However, the real focus of this show, and the main reason we returned several times, is that it includes enough paintings by Ernest Lawson (nine in all) to make up a decent exhibition by itself. The thick textures and glittering jewel tones that Lawson used to depict rugged urban and rural scenes, mostly from upper Manhattan and the lower Hudson river valley, put him in a class by himself, and the nine paintings visiting here from the Phillips, painted from 1900 through 1921, are top-drawer. (So far as I know, no other museum owns such a large group of Lawsons.) I was especially drawn to Spring Night, Harlem River, a blue-green scene of a large bridge and the riverbank below it, and Ice in the River, done in greens and browns.

This exhibition does not amount to an overview of American impressionism because Duncan Phillips failed to collect several of the most notable American impressionists, and also because he seems to have preferred landscapes over interior scenes, still lifes, or portraits. Not represented, for instance, are Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Philip Leslie Hale, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Guy Wiggins, Jonas Lie, Willard Metcalf, or Colin Campbell Cooper. Fortunately, the MAG has some of the best works of Lie (see picture just below), Metcalf, and Cooper in its permanent collection.

Jonas Lie's "Morning on a River"

The Memorial Art Galley has presented this traveling exhibition together with a room of American impressionist paintings owned by the MAG itself. I had never seen most of them, apparently because they were in need of restoration and not suitable for exhibition.

A few of these were undistinguished, we thought, but most were first-rate, including Edward Redfield’s River Hills (just below) and a small painting by Guy Wiggins, Fifth Avenue in Winter. I was especially irritated to know that Elmer Schofield’s Devon Countryside has languished in storage, unseen and unloved, for so long. (I would like very much to know whether this “Devon” is in England or New England.) This is a fine large summer scene of a sloping village lane, lined with stone walls and dappled with sunlight. Now that it has been cleaned, perhaps the curators will keep it on view after the exhibition is over.

I recommend a visit to the Phillips Collection itself, which is the proud home of Auguste Renoir’s grand and celebrated Luncheon of the Boating Party. We have visited this Washington, D.C. museum several times; it’s about 15 blocks northwest of the White House, too far to walk from the Mall, nowhere to park, best reached by subway. Duncan Phillips founded it in the late 1920s to showcase his own personal collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern art. Besides Cezannes, Picassos, and van Goghs, it has an outstanding collection of paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Mark Rothko, and Jacob Lawrence.