Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Art: Gathering to capture impressions

Impressionism is a term freighted with considerable popular appeal, interpretive ambiguity, and marketing potential. One need only look at the Barnes Foundation's marketing tactics to understand how the word can be used, and abused.

Impressionism is a term freighted with considerable popular appeal, interpretive ambiguity, and marketing potential. One need only look at the Barnes Foundation's marketing tactics to understand how the word can be used, and abused.

Ultimately, it all depends on what one expects from an impressionist painting. I favor the purist position, paintings that sparkle with shimmering light and high-spirited color.

Among French impressionists this means Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley. Their American counterparts would be Theodore Robinson, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Dennis Miller Bunker, Childe Hassam, and, occasionally, J. Alden Weir.

The question of who among American painters practiced the most refined form of impressionism pervades an exhibition at the Reading Public Museum called "The Lure of the Artists' Colony."

The show calls attention to a defining characteristic of the American movement - the proclivity of impressionist painters to gather in picturesque places, often by the sea, to paint and socialize.

New Hope was one such place, and it was a legitimate colony in that it was permanent, rather than a seasonal rendezvous such as Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Conn.; Rockport and Cape Ann (meaning Gloucester), Mass., and Ogunquit, Maine.

The New Hope artists shouldn't require an introduction to residents of this region, but the other colonies may be less familiar. On that level alone this show has something interesting to convey. The artists are grouped in galleries according to the places with which they were most commonly identified.

Museum curator Scott Schweigert adopted that organizing theme as a way to impose logic on what might otherwise be an amorphous mass, given that all 82 paintings and 28 works on paper (mostly prints) are owned by the museum.

This in itself is a startling fact; how did a small regional institution come to own so much American impressionism? The answer, Schweigert says, is that both the museum and private collectors in the area gravitated toward impressionism during the roughly 20 to 25 years after the museum was founded in 1913.

Schweigert installed the show contextually. It begins with a nod to two prominent expatriates, Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, and to New York artists, particularly William Merritt Chase, an early exponent of the impressionist approach who ran his own summer colony at Shinnecock on Long Island.

One then moves into a section devoted to impressionists associated with Philadelphia, and from there into the show's quality core, a gallery featuring Pennsylvania and specifically New Hope impressionists such as Daniel Garber, Edward Redfield, Robert Spencer, and John Folinsbee.

It's here that one begins to feel the allure of high-key color and the shimmering, ethereal light that the French delivered so consistently.

One of the remaining two galleries covers the Connecticut colonies at Cos Cob, part of Greenwich, and Old Lyme, at the mouth of the Connecticut River west of New London. Here you'll encounter works by Hassam, John Twachtman, Henry Ward Ranger, Robert Reid, Guy Wiggins, Chauncey R. Ryder, and Ernest Lawson, all high-ranking impressionists.

The final gallery covers the Massachusetts centers, with paintings by William Paxton, Morris Hall Pancoast, Charles Webster Hawthorne, and Frank Benson. The installation finishes with a handful of works by painters who worked in California and Taos, N.M.

The Pennsylvania section, centered on New Hope, is clearly the strongest part of this collection - because, one must conclude, it features the best American impressionists.

Highlights include a large, top-shelf Garber landscape called Goat Hill; four splendid Redfields, two typically intense landscapes by Folinsbee, and a river scene by Spencer that delivers the sparkle I always hope to find in impressionism.

There are a number of other arresting works - an atmospheric view of Broad Street and Philadelphia City Hall by Paulette Van Roekens, a distant view of Reading from a dun-colored winter hillside by Joseph Trevitts, and an impressionist standby, a woman in a white dress bathed in bright sunshine, by Reid.

(The Van Roekens canvas, Towers in the Mist, is one of three Reading paintings that the James A. Michener Art Museum sought to borrow for its current survey of Bucks County art, "The Painterly Voice." The others are one of the Folinsbee landscapes, the dramatic Storm Light, and a landscape by William Lathrop, Muskrat Hunter.

(The Michener loan request triggered the realization at both museums that they were organizing closely related exhibitions that overlapped more than incidentally.)

On the debit side, the ambiguity of the term impressionism persists throughout the show. Schweigert has chosen an elastic interpretation that allows him to include many artists that I, and perhaps you, would see as realists - because of their palette, broad, fluid brushwork, draftsmanship, and even subject matter.

Folinsbee is a prime example - wonderful, but closer to George Bellows (compare him with a Bellows painting hanging with the permanent collection at the other end of the floor) than to Garber.

To be fair, many of these "realists" are clearly influenced by impressionism, especially in their use of bright colors and the way they generate internal light.

The influence of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is also apparent to the point that, after a while, "Artists' Colony" begins to feel a little like a celebration of traditional academic painting, with minor concessions to European innovation.

Ultimately, the limitations of being restricted to a single institutional collection also impinge on the exhibition's ability to make the strongest possible presentation of the theme. While the Pennsylvania impressionists are fairly represented, other important figures aren't.

For instance, Chase has only two portraits and a dark still life instead of one of his dazzling Shinnecock landscapes. Likewise Weir has only one picture, a watercolor still life of a dead rabbit, instead of one of his dappled green landscapes.

Unfortunately, the show entirely lacks paintings by six important American impressionists - Robinson, Edmund C. Tarbell, Dennis Miller Bunker, Theodore Butler, Lilla Cabot Perry, and Metcalf.

Despite these limitations, this exhibition should be experienced, both for the pleasing complement of prime pictures scattered throughout and because you'll encounter second-tier artists of whom you might not have heard, including a number of women.

Inevitably, the show also provokes viewers to think hard about impressionism's intrinsic qualities. Can they be pinned down unequivocally? Or should we perhaps not be too doctrinaire about the matter as long as paintings satisfy us emotionally as well as aesthetically?

Art: Artists in Colonies

"American Impressionism: The Lure of the Artists' Colony" continues at the Reading Public Museum, 500 Museum Rd., through Jan. 29. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and noon to 5 Sundays. Admission is $8 general and $6 for visitors 60 and older, students with ID, and children 4 and older. Information: 610-371-5850 or readingpublicmuseum.org.

EndText