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. (The Barnes has a couple of paintings by the American impressionist Ernest Lawson as well.)

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 every several years. 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 dozen or so 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. [Update: I see now (January 2009) that the renovations to the American art galleries aren't scheduled to be completed until early 2011.] [Further update from July 2011: they still aren't done. We're apparently looking at late 2012.]

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 the stacks 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! We 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!