American Impressionism At The Bruce Museum Of Arts And Science

American Impressionists were also influenced by works like Johannes Vermeer's Dutch interiors, John Constable's paintings of English rural life, Edgar Degas's depictions of Parisian laundresses and milliners, and views of manual labor in Japanese art.

Unlike many of their predecessors, American Impressionists chose to idealize and beautify images of toil. As Larkin puts it, "Although American Impressionists painted during a period of sweeping socioeconomic change, the optimism that had characterized the United States from the beginning persisted in society and found expression in their paintings." Consistent with this mind-set and their style, the hard manual labor and harsh working conditions that were the lot of the nation's working men and women were glossed over by Impressionists or, at best, were subtexts to happy images. If ugly elements of a scene intruded on a composition, Hassam, Twachtman and their colleagues often eliminated or hid such disturbing aspects under veils of snow, fog or night.

"In a troubled economic climate," says Larkin, "the American Impressionists reconciled the labor theme with the bright outlook associated with their chosen style, and embedded in the American psyche by employing strategies such as idealization, abstraction, concealment and erasure." Thus, their work reflected the "American attitude toward work as a positive thing. It was a means of economic advancement, self-realization and promoting the common good. Purposeful labor was seen as a moral imperative in the Puritan tradition," she observes.

In this context, the Impressionists tended to create upbeat views of Americans at work, whether in cities or rural areas, on waterfronts, in factories, mills and quarries and in the home. While studying in Paris in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, many of these artists had become interested in depicting everyday life in the modern city, as well as the rhythms of the countryside. But in their effort to produce appealing works, they turned a blind eye to the less attractive aspects of Americans at work.

It was left to Robert Henri and his Ashcan School followers, who overlapped the Impressionists in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, to convey a sense of the slums, back alleys, barrooms and congested living conditions of America's cities.

Before the urban realists came on the scene, Hassam's cityscapes focused on grand avenues populated by elegant gentry and marginalized weary coachmen, flower vendors and women with market baskets as peripheral figures. Robinson touched on class distinctions and the anonymity of modern urban life when he contrasted a fashionably dressed woman strolling past workmen repairing a pavement in "Beacon Street, Boston," 1884.

Impressionist rural canvases, such as Edward Potthast's depiction of a country lad sharpening his sickle and Weir's "Ploughing for Buckwheat," 1898, in which a stalwart Yankee farmer halts his giant red oxen to gaze at his young daughter playing nearby, exemplify "nostalgia for an idealized rural past," explains Larkin.

As they sojourned along the New England coast in the summer, American Impressionists not only painted people at ease and at play, but also subjects relating to the region's long traditions of shipbuilding and fishing. In compositions inspired by Japanese art, Hassam created cropped views of men building a schooner in Provincetown, Gloucester caulkers making a new boat watertight and workmen renovating the railroad bridge over Connecticut's Mianus River. John J. Enneking's solitary young "Duxbury Clam Digger," 1892, which emphasized the backbreaking nature of this task, suggested that such hard work helped build the character associated with New Englanders.

The hustle and bustle of New York's waterfront was captured, albeit from a distance, by Everett L. Warner, who juxtaposed the frenetic activity of men and horse-drawn rigs around the fish houses against the Brooklyn Bridge, the towering icon of modern engineering. In "Along the River Front, New York," 1912, Warner "portrayed the waterfront as a still-vital source of the nation's energy," observes Larkin.

In benign renderings of the giant US Thread Company mills in Willimantic, Conn., Weir eliminated intrusive railroad tracks and presented the factories as handsome, sun-splashed, tree-shaded structures that harmonized with their natural setting. The exhibition displays all four of Weir's paintings on the subject together for the first time, offering comparative insights into the manner in which he emphasized the positive aspects of the operating site of the state's largest employer.

In Pennsylvania, Garber exploited the coloristic potential of the multihued rock patterns of distant quarries along the Delaware River, ignoring the smoke, dust and machinery required to work them. Fellow Pennsylvania Impressionist Robert Spencer's mostly female mill workers, dwarfed by drab factories, are well-dressed and appear to enjoy a pleasant work environment in "One O'Clock Break," circa 1913.

The expatriate Sargent, so often associated with society portraits, made a pleasingly aesthetic composition that at the same time conveyed his admiration for the hard, age-old task of cutting Italy's famous white stone in "Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara," 1911. It is, as Larkin observes, a "gorgeous" work, a highlight of the show.

While the American Impressionists showed women cooking, cleaning, sewing, doing laundry and other domestic chores, their canvases conveyed little of the hardships and drudgery of housework. Chase, T.C. Steele and others featured wash billowing picturesquely in breezes, but gave no hint of the hard work preceding such displays.

California Impressionist Jean Mannheim and Midwesterner Ada Walter Shulz, whose accomplished work is largely unknown today, offered sunny portrayals of women doing laundry, accompanied by their children. These happy country images of washing contrasted with those created around the same time in cities by Ashcanners John Sloan and others that showed working-class women doggedly hanging laundry on tenement rooftops or out windows. Boston School stalwart Joseph DeCamp showed a pretty young maid admiring her employer's delicate china in the Vermeer-like "The Blue Cup," 1909.

By standing back and avoiding the sweat and hardships, as well as the socioeconomic turmoil surrounding the working people of their era, American Impressionists created memorable canvases separated from what they actually observed. In effect, they followed the admonition of editor/writer William Dean Howells (to novelists) to "concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American."

While glossing over the gritty realities of the world around them that Ashcan School painters were soon to capture, American Impressionists created "some of the most engaging images of the turn of the last century," Larkin concludes. The Impressionists "endeavored not only to make a work of art but to make an art of work."

The exhibition's handsome, 186-page catalog reproduces all 46 works in the show, along with European and other American views of labor. There are useful entries by Larkin and Arlene Katz Nichols on each painting in the exhibition.

Highly informative, insightful chapters by Larkin place the work of American Impressionists in a larger art-historical context, examine international sources for images of labor and explore strategies employed by the Impressionists on the theme of work. This book makes a substantial contribution to scholarship about American art. Published by the Bruce Museum, it is priced at $40 (softcover).

The Bruce Museum is at One Museum Drive. For information, 203-869-0376 or www.brucemuseum.org.

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