: In their heyday, between 1885 and 1920, American Impressionists
created some of the sunniest, most appealing paintings in the
history of the nation's art. Zealously courting patrons, they
applied flickering brushwork and a bright palette to optimistic,
atmospheric views of specifically American subjects, generally
ignoring the unattractive aspects of the world around them.
In reality, they worked at a time when the United States was
still healing from its bloody, traumatic Civil War, when
materialism, urbanization, immigration and labor unrest were
straining the national social fabric, and when there was
widespread concern about the flood of allegedly undesirable
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Overlooking this
roiling American scene, the Impressionists focused on familiar
depictions of genteel folks at leisure and idyllic views of
nature.
From time to time, however, some in their own way explored the
theme of labor. When they did so, these artists tended to create
images that suggested the beauty and humanity of various work
settings, rather than the hard work involved.
This overlooked aspect of their oeuvre is examined in a splendid
exhibition, "American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work," on view
at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science through January 8. In
astutely selected examples and with illuminating catalog
commentaries, guest curator Susan G. Larkin demonstrates the
manner in which the light-filled, colorful images created by
these turn-of-the-Twentieth Century artists were largely detached
from the realities of their day.
In "The Factory Village," 1897, J. Alden Weir used various
kinds of vegetation to screen the enormous mill complex in
Willimantic, Conn., harmonizing it with its natural
environment. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As Larkin writes in the catalog, "Previous studies of the
labor theme in American art have stopped short of the
Impressionists or skipped over them to pick up the thread with
their successors, the Urban Realists." The exhibition and its
catalog are the thus the first comprehensive treatments of labor in
the art of such Impressionist masters as William Merritt Chase,
Daniel Garber, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson,
John Singer Sargent, John H. Twachtman and J. Alden Weir.
In making "the beauty of work a central and recurrent feature of
their art," observes Bruce Museum executive director Peter C.
Sutton, these artists "reflected a national identification with
the dignity of labor, the positive regard for industry and the
celebration of commerce as ideals befitting a self-reliant,
independent and hardworking country."
The American belief in the value of honest toil found artistic
expression in such late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century
depictions as John Singleton Copley's silversmith Paul Revere at
his workbench, Eastman Johnson's maple syrup makers and cranberry
harvesters, John Ferguson Weir's munitions manufacturers, Winslow
Homer's New England fisherfolk and African American fieldworkers,
Thomas Eakins's shad fishermen and Lily Martin Spencer's women
doing housework. Reflecting the nation's transformation from an
agrarian to an industrial economy, these painters paid tribute to
the strengths and virtues of human labor and set potential
precedents for artists who followed.
