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American Impressionism and Realism: Virtual tour

Although most American Impressionists preferred to flee urban pressures, some were captivated by urban energy and encoded their era’s bustling spirit and fragmented experience in rapidly rendered vignettes. They retreated into genteel precincts, such as parks, and celebrated the fashionable avenues and squares, ignoring the mean streets and teeming slums. They often used elevated vantage points to distance themselves from their scenes and favoured poetic times of day or the softening effect of snow. Their paintings sometimes contain nostalgic reminiscences of older times, suggestions of nationalistic pride, and remnants of the poetic and picturesque amidst the clatter and crowds.

Nineteenth-century urbanisation was even more extreme in the United States than in Europe, and New York was in many ways more modern than Paris. Yet, there are few suggestions of dissonance in American Impressionist cityscapes, unlike their French counterparts. With the exception of the expatriates John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, the American Impressionists avoided portraying public entertainment. They may have been eager theatregoers, but they were also family men, and they avoided themes that might have implied slumming.

The American Realists repudiated the American Impressionists’ respectable airs, committing themselves, at least nominally, to social activism and to candid portrayals of modern life. Yet, they continued their predecessors’ euphemisms, finding inspiration in the parks and noting only the picturesque aspects of immigrant enclaves. Like the Impressionists, the Realists often recorded views on the city’s periphery, merely hinting at industrial incursions. The Realists’ experience as artist–journalists attracted them to public entertainment, and they painted theatre, vaudeville, hotels, and other features of commercialised leisure. Unlike their French artistic mentors, Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, who often infused their scenes of urban leisure with tension and pathos, they emphasised good-natured comedies of manners played out in congenial settings.

Australia

In the 1880s, the major cities of Melbourne and Sydney were the main Australian centres for making and collecting art. Each city evolved in different ways, with Melbourne benefiting from the gold rush of the 1850s and Victoria’s rich pastoral resources. Both Melbourne and Sydney’s urban populations were growing rapidly, and Australian artists of the time testified to the bustling vitality of these new cities, capturing their spirit and dynamism. Remarkable foresight by Robert Hoddle, Assistant Surveyor General, is credited with the planning of Melbourne’s wide boulevard-like streets in the 1830s, likened to Haussmann’s transformation of Paris between 1852 and 1870.

Charles Conder’s marvellous painting of Circular Quay in Sydney highlights the important role of sea transport, showing the lively quay as a point of departure and arrival, an essential link to England, Europe and the wider world. As well as urban development, the gold rushes had triggered a shipping boom, with competing fleets operating on the England–Australia run. The first steamship sailed between England and Sydney in 1852.

The early decades of the twentieth century saw enormous developments in Australian cities, but many artists, such as Roland Wakelin in The fruitseller of Farm Cove, chose not to document the grittier impacts of industrialisation and urbanisation at this time, at least in painting. Wakelin’s Impressionist experiment, showing the city as a site of genteel leisure, consequently seems related to an earlier artistic and social era. However, he would soon become, briefly, one of the leaders of modern art in Australia.

Sydney had been in the grip of a construction boom in 1912–14, when thousands of buildings were completed annually – although few of them would be classed skyscrapers in the ‘Manhattan’ style. In fact, there were heated debates in both Sydney and New York about the advantages and disadvantages of tall buildings; in Sydney and Melbourne, city planning prohibited ‘skyscrapers’ until the building boom of the 1950s. Bourke Street, however, still resembles the grand nineteenth-century streetscape depicted in Roberts’s painting.

George Bellows

1882–1925

Up the Hudson 1908

Oil on canvas

Gift of Mr Hugo Reisinger, 1911

Acc. 11.17

Like Bellows’s early portrayals of street kids, boxing matches and the construction of Pennsylvania Station, his landscapes also engaged with the realism of urban development and industrialisation. Up the Hudson belongs to a series of views from Manhattan’s Riverside Park that he began in 1907. Riverside Park – extending nearly 7.5 kilometres along the Hudson River – was one of many city parks developed in the late nineteenth century to provide New Yorkers respite from city life. Bellows hints at labour and industry in this work by including a steamboat and a train emerging from behind a stand of leafless trees. His acknowledging industry in the landscape is in contrast to many of his contemporaries, who eschewed portraying modern developments in favour of emphasising a simpler, more rural ideal.

Childe Hassam

1859–1935

Avenue of the allies, Great Britain, 1918

Oil on canvas

Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967

Acc. 67.187.127

Hassam was the only major American Impressionist to paint the home front during World War One. In response to the patriotic displays of multi-coloured flags and banners decorating the tall buildings along Fifth Avenue, he created his most successful group of paintings, including Avenueof the Allies, Great Britain. Fifth Avenue was decorated with the flags of all 22 allies with nations assigned to particular blocks. Hassam presents the view up Fifth Avenue from Fifty-third Street, at the beginning of the block dedicated to Great Britain, New Zealand and Canada; the flags of Brazil and Belgium appear on the block beyond. American flags appeared at intervals along the route and red Liberty Loan banners – intended to support fundraising efforts – adorned the lampposts. Hassam exhibited 23 flag paintings at New York’s Durand-Ruel Galleries just four days after the armistice was signed, on 11 November 1918.

Childe Hassam

1859–1935

Broadway and 42nd Street 1902

Oil on canvas

Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967

Acc. 67.187.128

In 1896–97, Hassam spent ten months travelling in Europe. On his return to New York, he shifted the focus of his city scenes away from the previous views of fashionable districts, and instead sought to capture the dramatic, atmospheric effects of the modern city. Broadway and 42nd Street describes the bustling centre of New York’s theatre district. In 1904, when the city’s leading newspaper, the New York Times, opened its headquarters there, the neighbourhood became known as Times Square. Electric lights were first installed in the square in 1895, and the electric advertising signs that earned that stretch of Broadway its nickname, ‘The Great White Way’, began appearing around 1900. In Hassam’s view of Times Square, crowded sidewalks and pavements jammed with horse-drawn cabs and modern trolleys are bathed in the glow of electric light, but urban bustle is muted by the falling snow.

William Glackens

1870–1938

Central Park, winter c.1905

Oil on canvas

George A Hearn Fund, 1921

Acc. 21.164

New York’s 840 acre (340 hectare) Central Park opened to the public in 1859 and quickly became a locus of activity for New Yorkers of all ages and backgrounds. For some painters, it offered an opportunity to depict New Yorkers at leisure in quasi-rural surroundings. In Central Park, winter, for example, William Glackens portrays a group of well-behaved children sledding down a gently sloping hill. Unlike their unsupervised counterparts often found in Realist paintings, Glackens’s youths play under the watchful eyes of adults who dot the perimeter of the snowy knoll. After around 1910, Glackens would gravitate to the vivid colours of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. In Central Park, winter, however, he maintained his stylistic alliance with the New York Realist painters who formed the core of his social and professional circle.

William Glackens

1870–1938

The green car 1910

Oil on canvas

Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1937

Acc. 37.73

In 1904, Glackens settled with his wife on Washington Square, in the heart of New York City’s Greenwich Village. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the area around the Square was a province of the moneyed elite and many of New York’s most prominent families. Following the Civil War, the exclusive neighbourhood changed as the rich migrated uptown along Fifth Avenue and the area became home to artists and immigrant communities. The green car is a view of Washington Square looking north from Glackens’s studio window. The streetcar he depicts in this work was powered by underground electrical cables and was considered a major technological achievement, replacing the earlier horse-drawn trolleys and the streetcars that relied on exposed overhead cables. This new technology is juxtaposed in the work against a backdrop of old New York.

Tom Roberts

1856–1931

Allegro con brio, Bourke Street west c.1885–90

Oil on canvas on composition board

Purchased 1918

Collection: National Library of Australia and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Allegro con brio, Bourke Street west is the most contemporary and singular of Roberts’s paintings. It depicts Bourke Street, the business heart of Melbourne, at the intersection with Elizabeth Street, looking west towards Spencer Street. This, Humphrey McQueen writes, was where the upper classes mixed with the masses, united by commercial needs.

Roberts had recently returned to Australia from Europe, brimming with energy at the prospect of a new approach to the Australian landscape. He had become familiar with the naturalism of the French Barbizon School and at least indirectly with French Impressionism. However, a more decisive influence was the work of James McNeill Whistler, which Roberts probably saw in the well-publicised exhibition ‘Notes – Harmonies – Nocturnes’ in London in May 1884 – Roberts’s allusion to music in his title consciously draws this comparison. The excitement and drama of the modern city can be discerned in all the details of this painting. For Monet the city was Haussmann’s Paris; for the American Childe Hassam it was New York; for Roberts it was ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.

Cities

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Cities

American Impressionism and Realism: Virtual tour

Australia

George Bellows

Up the Hudson 1908

Childe Hassam

Avenue of the allies, Great Britain, 1918

Childe Hassam

Broadway and 42nd Street 1902

William Glackens

Central Park, winter c.1905

William Glackens

The green car 1910

Tom Roberts

Allegro con brio, Bourke Street west c.1885–90

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