Education

The countryside abroad

American Impressionism and Realism: Virtual tour

The most cosmopolitan artists in the nation’s history, the American Impressionists experienced many places abroad and at home that energised their art. During the summers, many of them followed the pattern of their international counterparts, residing in picturesque European villages redolent of tradition and spiritual authenticity. In France, most of the alluring country retreats were in the Paris suburbs or in Normandy and Brittany. These rural locales were all easily accessible, first by railroad to a larger nearby town and then by horse-drawn vehicle or on foot – journeys that in themselves signified beguiling transitions from the present to the past.

Some painters worked alone in out-of-the-way villages, as did John H Twachtman in Arques-la-Bataille, near Dieppe on the Normandy coast. During summers, Childe Hassam visited friends in Villiers-le-Bel, in the Oise Valley about 20 kilometres north of Paris. Others preferred to work outdoors in the company of like-minded colleagues, and to live for a while in pastoral calm as bohemians, even to don wooden clogs and straw hats as practical, and symbolic, accessories. The art colonies that developed in certain rustic communities attracted dozens of painters each summer, and a few who bought houses also built studios and remained for years. One art colony denizen, the Irish painter Henry Jones Thaddeus, noted in his autobiography Recollections of a Court Painter (1912):

The life in the open air, together with the absorbing, delightful occupation of painting from nature, followed by the pleasant reunions in the evening, constituted an ideal existence to which I know no parallel.

Beginning around 1875, idyllic Grez-sur-Loing, on the southern edge of the Fontainebleau forest, 80 kilometres south of Paris, attracted American, Scandinavian, British and other painters. In the mid 1880s, many Americans chose instead to go to Giverny, the ancient Norman farming hamlet on the Seine, where Claude Monet had settled in April 1883.

As early as October 1887, an American critic marvelled in Art Amateur:

Quite an American colony has gathered, I am told, at Giverny . . . A few pictures just received from these young men show that they have all got the blue-green colour of Monet’s impressionism and ‘got it bad’.

Not only was the conversion of American painters to Impressionism stimulated and reinforced by their experience in Giverny, but the village’s art colony became a model for emulation when they moved elsewhere in Europe or Great Britain, or returned to the United States. Although American Impressionists were drawn to Grez, Giverny and other French villages, some worked in similarly nostalgic settings in England and Italy, seeking personal serenity along with professional stimulation; vestiges of traditional architecture and old-fashioned activities; and respite from academic studies, urban pressures and summer heat.

John H Twachtman

1853–1902

Arques-la-bataille c.1884

Oil on canvas

Purchase, The Charles Engelhard Foundation Gift, 1991

Acc. 1991.130

Twachtman travelled in 1875 to Munich, Germany, where he studied for a time before relocating to Paris and enrolling at the Académie Julian in 1883. There, Twachtman met compatriots with whom he would later form Ten American Painters, a group identified with Impressionism. Like many art students, Twachtman also travelled to the French countryside in order to paint outdoors. His canvases from the summer of 1884 depict the environs of the Arques-la-Bataille, a village north-west of Paris, on the coast of Normandy. In Arques-la-Bataille,Twachtman sketches the Béthune, a tributary of the Arques River in a a quiet meditation on a seemingly unexceptional scene. After returning to his Paris studio in 1884, Twachtman used this sketch as the basis for a much larger painting, Arques-la-Bataille 1885, also in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

John H Twachtman

1853–1902

Arques-la-bataille c.1884

Oil on canvas

Purchase, The Charles Engelhard Foundation Gift, 1991

Acc. 1991.130

John Singer Sargent

1856–1925

Reapers resting in a wheat field 1885

Oil on canvas

Gift of Mrs Francis Ormond, 1950

Acc. 50.130.14

In 1886, Sargent closed his Paris studio and settled in London where he established a career as a portraitist. He also took the opportunity to paint in the English countryside. In 1885 and 1886, he summered at Broadway, a popular art colony and tourist destination in the Cotswolds, Worcestershire, north-west of London. In Reapers resting in a wheat field, with a few spare strokes, Sargent renders a group of harvesters resting from their labour, their sickles lying in the field. Sickles were antiquated tools by the mid 1880s, but here Sargent nostalgically celebrates a site where they were still in use. The theme of rural labour is a popular subject in art history, and Sargent would have known paintings by the nineteenth-century French Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet, depicting similar subjects.

John Singer Sargent

1856–1925

Bringing down marble from the quarries to Carrara 1911

Oil on canvas

Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917

Acc. 17.97.1

In October 1911, Sargent visited the famed marble quarries of Carrara, about 100 kilometres north-west of Florence, where he recorded the dramatic landscape and the arduous work of the stonecutters. He produced a series of impressive watercolours, sketches and oils, including Bringing down marble from the quarries to Carrara. The exceptionally pure marble, quarried at Carrara since antiquity, was renowned for its use in many architectural and artistic masterpieces, from the Pantheon in ancient Rome to Michelangelo’s David 1501–04. Sargent often favoured subjects emphasising continuity and tradition over modern technology. The method of quarrying marble at Carrara had changed little over time. In this work, Sargent depicts the workers adjusting and securing the ropes used to lower the colossal blocks of marble from the mountain into the valley below.

Robert Vonnoh

1858–1933

The bridge at Grez c.1907–11

Oil on canvas

Gift of Mrs Louis Lewison, 1970

Acc. 1970.149

During his second visit to France from 1887 to 1891, Vonnoh devoted himself to painting from nature in the art colony at Grez-sur-Loing, 80 kilometres south of Paris, near the older, better known colony at Barbizon. His exposure to the plein-air painters there and to works by the French Impressionists in Paris nurtured his interest in recording the effects of light. By the 1870s, Grez was home to a thriving group of international artists. The town’s principal attraction was its location on the picturesque Loing River, a popular subject for paintings and a venue for recreation. In The bridge at Grez, Vonnoh presents a view from his home of the river and the stone bridge that crossed it. Vonnoh eliminates any reference to recreation, and describes instead a tranquil and timeless scene empty of figures and filled with mist.

John Russell

1858–1930

Amandiers et ruines, Sicile (Almond trees and ruins, Sicily) 1887

Oil on canvas

Purchased 1989 from the estate of Lady Trout with a special allocation from the Queensland Government

Collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

After meeting Monet at Belle-Île in the summer of 1886, John Russell returned to Paris and his classes at the Atelier Cormon in October, uncertain about his direction, and feeling that he needed to make substantial changes to his work to encompass all he had learnt. Late that year, he set out to explore the southern coastlines of Italy, in early 1887, settling for a time in the Sicilian town of Taormina, in the shadow of Mount Etna, and travelling to the other side of the island to view the Hellenic ruins overlooking the Mediterranean at Agrigento. This spectacular site, around 1000 metres above sea level, houses several Greek temples.

Russell chose to paint the picturesque Temple of Castor and Pollux, comprising just four columns and a portion of architrave scavenged from other temple sites, a reconstruction made in 1836. In Amandiers et ruines, Sicile (Almond trees and ruins, Sicily), the ruins are seen together with almond trees in blossom, the symbol of time’s passage and a well-known Impressionist motif. A petal remains caught in the paint near the shadow of the tree, confirming, perhaps deliberately, the painting’s plein-air status.