Education

The countryside at home

American Impressionism and Realism: Virtual tour

Most of the repatriated American Impressionists painted the countryside to which they and their patrons often retreated. They founded and frequented picturesque art colonies or worked alone in other rural locales: Greenwich and Cos Cob in Connecticut; Shinnecock and East Hampton on Long Island, New York; and the area around New Hope, Pennsylvania. In such areas they enjoyed inexpensive accommodation, nostalgic subjects that evoked a more tranquil era, and a strong sense of place. New England was especially rich in references to Anglo-Saxon settlements in North America. In an era of burgeoning cities overflowing with immigrants, such historical associations revived and reinforced nationalistic sentiments.

Claude Monet’s own interest in nationalistic themes in the 1890s – apparent in his celebrations of French agricultural bounty in the ‘Haystack’ series, and of French history in the ‘Rouen Cathedral’ series – may have helped the Americans see Impressionism as an antidote to the cosmopolitanism that had affected their art since the end of the Civil War. It may seem like a paradox because Impressionism was a foreign style, but its emphasis on the expression of place appealed to painters who had travelled far and wide, but who now wished to convey the essence of home.

The American Impressionists’ selective approach to modern life conjured an agreeable world for their patrons, who were also daunted by the perplexing realities of an unsettling, transitional time. The attitudes informing American Impressionist paintings also infused the history, literature, philosophy, poetry, drama and music of the 1890s. Paul Dresser’s popular song about his Indiana childhood, ‘On the banks of the Wabash, far away’, and John Philip Sousa’s rousing ‘Stars and stripes forever’, both published in 1897, typify the period’s nostalgic, nationalistic spirit.

Embracing urban subjects, the American Realists confined landscape painting to views of New York City’s outskirts or to summer excursions, including those they made to New England locales, such as Gloucester, Massachusetts. George Bellows regularly painted landscapes, but this is a subject that can be identified primarily with the American Impressionists.

Australia

Throughout the nineteenth century, landscape painting was central to Australian art, part of the cultural inheritance from Great Britain. In the decades before the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, however, painting en plein air came to have special significance as a marker of the strengthened nationalist sentiment of the times.

No-one had painted Australia quite like this before, and the new landscape painting drew on artistic influences from abroad. Tom Roberts returned to Melbourne from Europe in 1885, and set up an artist camp at Box Hill in suburban Melbourne with Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams. They shared an interest in Impressionism, however general their understanding of this movement may have been; and they advocated working en plein air, and sought to capture the fleeting effects of light. Arthur Streeton and young English artist Charles Conder soon joined them. The group affected a bohemian attitude, communed with nature and made excursions to the suburbs to paint. Australian Impressionism has for many years been known as the ‘Heidelberg School’, after one of the Melbourne suburbs frequented by these painters – the phrase was first coined by the American art critic Sidney Dickinson in a review in 1891. The artists drew on familiar bush landscapes, glimpses of urban life and the new nationalistic sentiments to nourish an Australian ‘school’ of painting.

In subsequent decades, Heidelberg School images became extremely important as an expression of national identity. This ‘golden age’ of landscape painting was upheld as a refuge from the uncertainty and insecurity of World War One, and was said to have contributed to the enhanced sense of nationhood claimed on the battlefield. The almost mythological significance attributed to Australian Impressionism persists even today, and these works have entered popular consciousness like no others in the history of Australian art.

The Australian landscape was also deployed to emotive effect in the late nineteenth century. David Davies’s nocturnes and twilight scenes of symbolic indeterminacy reveal the influence of James McNeill Whistler, as well as hinting at the influence of French symbolist mythology and allegory in Australian art.

Theodore Robinson

1852–96

Low tide, Riverside Yacht Club 1894

Oil on canvas

Gift of Raymond J and Margaret Horowitz, 2007

Acc. 2007.281.3

Robinson returned to the United States in 1892 after spending much of the preceding eight years in France, where he developed his Impressionist style. He settled in New York City, but frequently visited nearby rural locales in order to paint en plein air. During the summer of 1894, he travelled to Cos Cob, Connecticut, a popular art colony, where he created a series of canvases depicting sailboats on the estuary of the Mianus River. Low tide, Riverside Yacht Club represents Robinson’s attempt to break from his French subjects and depict a quintessentially American site, redolent of local history and culture. Cos Cob was ideal for this purpose: it was a picturesque farming village that retained New England traditions, yet, with improved rail service, was emerging as a popular suburb of New York City.

J Alden Weir

1852–1919

The factory village 1897

Oil on canvas

Gift of Cora Weir Burlingham, 1979, and Purchase,

Marguerite and Frank Cosgrove Jr Fund, 1998

Acc. 1979.487

Weir expressed disdain for the work of the Impressionists following his first encounter with it in Paris in 1877. After his return to the United States later that year, however, he developed sympathy for the works of Edouard Manet. By the 1890s, under the influence of his friends Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson and John Twachtman, he was willing to experiment with Impressionism. Like many of his American colleagues, Weir did not adopt the style wholesale. The factory village – portraying the Willimantic Linen Company in Willimantic, Connecticut – is an example of his ambition to combine Impressionist freedom with a residue of academic precision. The linkages he creates between the rural, bucolic landscape and invading industry typify American artists’ restraint in recording the harsh changes in modern life.

John H Twachtman

1853–1902

Horseneck Falls c.1889–1900

Oil on canvas

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

Acc. 67.187.142

Twachtman returned to the United States from his studies in Paris in 1886. In 1888, he rented a house in Branchville, Connecticut, north-east of New York City, near the home of his close friend the painter J Alden Weir. Twachtman purchased land and a small farmhouse in the village of Greenwich, near Branchville. Horseneck Falls offers an intimate view of the small cascade on the artist’s property which he painted frequently, depicting it from various viewpoints and during all seasons. His treatment of the theme in series recalls the work of the French Impressionist Claude Monet, but Twachtman’s repetitions seem to emerge from his personal affinity with a subject, rather than from a desire to explore the nature of light and optics.

Childe Hassam

1859–1935

The church at Gloucester 1918

Oil on canvas

Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1925

Acc. 25.206

Hassam considered New England’s white clapboard churches, from the colonial era and the early decades of the Republic, as emblems of beauty and Anglo-American tradition. He painted a series of images of the First Congregational Church in Old Lyme, Connecticut, between 1903 and 1906, and returned to the subject of churches while visiting Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1918. In The church at Gloucester, Hassam depicts the town’s Universalist Church, framing the composition with elms in autumn foliage and calling attention to its classical pediment and facade. The exclusion of references to the human presence suggests the subject’s timelessness. Gloucester’s Universalist Church was noted for its architecture and its bell, which had been cast at the foundry of Paul Revere, the important patriot of the American Revolution.

Childe Hassam

1859–1935

Surf, Isles of Shoals 1913

Oil on canvas

Gift of Dr and Mrs Sheldon C Sommers, 1996

Acc. 1996.382

Like many American Impressionists, Hassam sought inspiration at picturesque art colonies along the New England coast, including Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut; and Gloucester, Massachusetts. The Isles of Shoals was a cluster of rocky islands about 14 kilometres off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine, where Hassam painted hundreds of oils and watercolours between 1886 and 1916. As a study of pattern and light, Hassam’s Surf, Isles of Shoals is closer to the seascapes of the French Impressionists than to those by his American contemporary Winslow Homer, who also painted the rugged Maine coast. Where Homer concentrated on the ocean’s elemental, ominous power, Hassam presents an inviting, sunny view, maintaining a distance from the crashing waves and relegating them to the edges of the composition.

Tom Roberts

1856–1931

A summer morning tiff 1886

Oil on canvas

The Pinkerton Bequest Fund, 1943

Collection: Art Gallery of Ballarat

Returning to Melbourne from Europe in 1885, Roberts organised painting trips to bushland near Melbourne. With Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Charles Conder (among others), he painted en plein air around Melbourne and also Sydney during the 1880s and 1890s.

A summer morning tiff is an enchanting scene of romanticinteraction set in a quintessentially Australian landscape. It captures the intense heat and bright sunlight of a summer morning, positioning the downcast young woman in white (the model is Frederick McCubbin’s sister Harriet) through a stand of eucalyptus trees. Her beau is in the background, moving away with his horse into the dense bush. The bright palette is Roberts’s declaration of independence from the traditional academic style of the National Gallery School in Melbourne. In the local newspaper, the Argus, the work was described as ‘a composition which shows the influence of the Impressionists’.