Traditions and Innovations
Impressionist landscape painting seems to late-twentieth-century eyes to be an obvious way to depict the beauties of nature: concentrate on her colors and moods, and let the specific forms dissolve into the light of the scene. Yet it is also common knowledge that Impressionism at its outset was shocking in its denial of three-dimensional form and its joyful celebration of the transitory moment instead of the somber worship of everlasting truth. How are these two observations reconciled, and why do American Impressionist landscapes appeal to most people today? The answer is surprisingly simple. American landscape painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew inspiration primarily from three sources: the “native” American tradition of the Hudson River School (c. 1830 – 1860s) and its later variation called Luminism; the “foreign” but nevertheless extremely popular Barbizon School from France (1830s – 1870s), which spawned the equally popular American Tonalism; and the “new” Impressionist approach to painting. Of these, the Barbizon-Luminist Tonalist traditions exerted the most influence on the artist’s unconscious aesthetic, and the Impressionist style was consciously emulated and promoted. Each of these had a distinctive American flavor that appealed to both patrons and critics and facilitated American Impressionism’s entry into the contemporary visual vocabulary.
The work of Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and the rest of the Hudson RiverSchool stressed the transcendental beauty of nature, specifically that of the American wilderness as presented in the Catskills and the Hudson Valley. The technique was extremely detailed, with each leaf and blade of grass shown and the recession of the scene into space precisely rendered. This “romantic” view presented the landscape as an appropriate place in which to contemplate God and nature as possessing the ability to purify the spirit. Accordingly, the light bathing the scenery depicted was gentle, graduated, and unobtrusively illuminating. The paintings glorified not only the handiwork of God, but the manifest destiny of American people as well. The effects of this worship of the specifically American landscape upon the painters of almost fifty years later cannot be overemphasized. Works by Cole, Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), and Jaspar F. Cropsey (1823-1900) were widely exhibited as late as 1899, and in all probability profoundly affected the attitude if not the stylistic tendencies of the fledgling American Impressionists.
The work of the French Barbizon painters Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875), and Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-1878) also exerted tremendous influence on American Impressionist landscapists. These “Men of 1830” portrayed the rural scenery in France in such a way that the dignity of peasant life and the tamed landscape appealed to critics and patrons almost immediately. In the paintings, lowering clouds took the place of the glaring light of neoclassical French painting, and a sense of idyllic calm pervaded the scene. The themes presented were especially appealing to an America torn by the Civil War and dismayed by the creeping industrialization of the once-pristine landscape. The Barbizon landscape was a secular counterpart to the almost religious works of Cole and Durand and seemed more in line with the prevailing national ideal of democracy than did the awe-inspiring Hudson RiverSchool landscape. The art dealer Seth M. Vose of Providence, Rhode Island, had wisely imported Corots, Daubignys, and Millets by 1857, and by 1860 many Boston collectors and artists (among them the artist William Morris Hunt [1824-1879] and the entrepreneur Quincy Adams Shaw [1825-1908]) were searching for and actively promoting Barbizon works. In New York artists began working in a modified Barbizon style during the 1860s, and the 1883 International Exhibition for Art and Industry’s “Foreign Exhibition” showed, alongside a few rather conservative French Impressionist works, a large number of Barbizon or Barbizon-inspired paintings. The painter George Inness (1825-1894) was the artistic force in America most influenced by French Barbizon work, and the artist was admired by Tonalists and Impressionists alike.
If Barbizon art seemed somehow more appropriate for America, it was only natural that it spawn two American offshoots directly related to its innovations. Luminism is characterized by a peculiarly bright light that throws forms into sharp relief similar to the Hudson River School techniques, and its proponents Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872), and Frederick Church (1816-1872) are often called the second generation of Hudson River School artists. These artists, however, chose to paint vistas of farmland, inhabited areas, or calm seascapes with boats rather than untamed wilderness, an aesthetic derived from the Barbizon influence. Tonalism used the darkish color and brushy technique of Barbizon art as focal points and eventually became the mainstream aesthetic of the 1880s and 1890s. The robust and earthy qualities of the French works were absent, perhaps because of an extension of the Romantic reverence for the land, and the landscapes seemed more shimmery and unreal. Vistas were unusual, and often a sole tree or other natural feature occupied the shallow pictorial space. A single color tone dominated, whether it was that of sunlight filtered through autumn leaves as in the work of Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916) or through grayish morning haze as in D. W Tryon’s (1849-1925) work. The Tonalist emphasis on light and color creating a mood of somber reflection and dematerializing the actual forms in the landscape predisposed the avant-garde art students of the 1880s to the Impressionists’ experiments with color theory, broken form, and brilliant sun-filled effects. The feeling of these contemporaries was that landscape was meant to be more human and subjective; in fact, Inness once said, “A work of art … does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion.”
The French Impressionists as early as 1874 had stressed this same markedly subjective treatment of landscape, but in such a way as to give the optical effect of objectivity. They valued plein-air over studio work, clear colors and shallow planes over three-dimensional solidity, and above all the transforming effects of sunlight. Paintings depicted fleeting moments in time: the idea of everlasting truth as captured in art was suddenly swept aside in favor of a means of expressing the joy of life and the beauty of spontaneity. These paintings used such techniques as laying short flicks of bright color alongside one another in such a way as to make the colors seem to blend as well as make the forms they depicted appear to shimmer and lose edge definition. New chemical processes resulted in chrome colors that heightened the sun drenched effect the artists sought, and these colors were used undiluted and unmixed. By the late 1880s, when both Impressionist and Barbizon paintings had been exhibited in America by the Parisian art dealer Durand-Ruel, American art students were flocking to the European academies.
Nearly all of the American artists in Paris during the 1880s studied at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts with the classicizing painter Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) or at the independent Academie Julian with the masters Gustave Boulanger (1824-1888) and Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1834-1911). The other major academic center, particularly for students from the Midwest, was Munich’s Royal Academy with the presiding master Ludwig von Loefftz (1845-1910). The academies prepared their students primarily for the drawing of the figure in minute detail, with the precise rendering of three dimensional form and an eye for light and shadow. The students, however, had probably seen the Impressionist paintings of Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, and Sisley and had certainly seen their more conservative reflections in the official Salon. During the long summer recess (May to October) most of the Americans escaped to art colonies in Brittany, especially to the towns of Pont-Aven and Concarneau, and produced studies of the peasant landscapes that showed both the strong, early Barbizon influence and the dissolution of form common to the French Impressionist painters. The winters were spent drawing in the ateliers and attending exhibitions of the official Salon painters and possibly the Salon des Refuses and the Impressionists.
The 1890s saw the students finishing their academic training and pursuing individual directions back in America with some critical acclaim. Their work, however, was by no means stylistically cohesive. Among these painters Childe Hassam (1859-1935) chose the “modern” approach of the Impressionists in his painting and used bright, scattering light and dabs of color; Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919), a slightly older artist who had studied with Gerome in the late 1870s, used the Tonalist palette in his landscapes but an Impressionist manner of handling paint; and Willard Metcalf (1852-1925), a Boulanger/Lefebvre student, specialized in landscape scenes that were dubbed “Academic Impressionism”: these and others formed “The Ten American Painters” in 1898, seceded from the Tonalist-dominated Society of American Artists, and exhibited together annually from 1898 to 1918-1919 in the major East Coast and Midwestern cities. Regional schools of Impressionism were well developed by 1895, among them the HoosierSchool in Brown County, Indiana, and the Pennsylvania School in New Hope. The style quickly gained in popularity by virtue of the number of artists working with it.
The American Impressionist landscape had by about 1915 become dominant in the American aesthetic: the paintings depicted recognizable regional locales at the height of seasonal beauty, with a natural light that was neither garishly bright nor remote and worshipful and forms that were neither over-detailed nor overly dissipated. In retrospect, this seems conservative to us in comparison to French Impressionism, but the rationale for this conservatism and the persistence of the Hudson River School, Barbizon, and Tonalist aesthetics well into the twentieth century was summed up concisely by Childe Hassam in 1935: “Good art does not become old-fashioned.”
Notes
- Quoted in Marcia Matthews, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1969, p. 70. 2. Quoted in Art Digest, vol.9, no 20, September 1, 1935, p. 13.
Additional Reading
- Bermingham, Peter. American Art in the Barbizon Mood. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1975. Gerdts, William. American Impressionism. Seattle: The HenryArtGallery, University of Washington, 1980. Gerdts, William, et al. Tonalism: an American Experience. New York: Grand Central Art Galleries, 1982.
- Huth, Hans. “Impressionism Comes to America.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts set. 6, vol. 29 (April 1946), pp. 225-52. Sellin, David. American Artists in Brittany and Normandy. Phoenix: The Phoenix Art Museum, 1982.