New York’s Whitney Museum, devoted to the display of American art, past and present, has now resurrected American Impressionist painters from the limbo in which most of them have reposed for the last thirty years. In so doing, it has demonstrated that despite their obvious adoption of alien—i.e., French—techniques, these artists retained a native Weltanschauung, making, in the process, notable contributions to American art. The exhibition, already seen at Washington’s National Gallery and scheduled to travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum and the North Carolina Museum at Raleigh, not only presents works by such internationally known figures as Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, but also rescues others from undeserved oblivion. It is full of charm, with lots of gay, shimmering landscapes peopled with willowy American girls “dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces and knots of pale colored ribbon . . . strikingly, admirably pretty,” painted embodiments of their contemporary, Henry James’s Daisy Miller, published in 1879.
Most of the twenty artists represented became converts to Impressionism during protracted study periods in Europe—almost de rigueur for American painters in the last third of the nineteenth century. Although a majority were schooled in the academic ateliers of Paris, a smaller, older group studied at the Munich Academy in the 1870s, among them William Merritt Chase and John Twachtman, both of whom, even after adopting the Impressionist palette, retained the slashing yet form-defining brush strokes they had learned there. Only the French-trained Americans wholeheartedly adopted the rough textures and broken color developed by Monet and Pissarro.
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