Charles Courtney Curran's (1861–1942) predilection for portraying sun-filled visions of young women in white dresses posed under scenic skies is exemplified by "On the Heights,” 1909. His bright palette, confident brushwork and optimistic outlook resulted in sunny canvases that typified the work of many of America's best Impressionists.
:The central role that French art and artists played in shaping American painting in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century is nowhere more evident than in the field of Impressionism. The up-and-coming US artists who flocked to Paris to study after the Civil War were exposed to developing French styles and fanned out into the countryside to practice their craft. Many returned as converts to the Impressionist aesthetic.
From the flowering of naturalistic landscapes in the 1840s to the onset of the Barbizon School, through Impressionism's golden age later in the century and beyond Post-Impressionism into the 1920s, Americans followed the French lead in transforming landscape painting with innovative techniques and unconventional styles. Impressionism came late to America, but once established, it became enormously popular with painters and collectors.
"Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism," a fascinating exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum and drawn from its impressive collection, explores landscape painting as practiced by French artists and their American counterparts during this time. Comprising 40 paintings, it is on view at the Denver Art Museum through September 7.
The transformation of French art from history painting to landscapes can be traced to 1822, when Camille Corot began to paint softly veiled, plein air landscapes around the Forest of Fontainebleau. By the 1830s, he was joined by a group of French artists who abandoned their studios for the open air of the countryside around Barbizon, on the edge of the still primeval forest, where old ways of life prevailed.
Edward W. Potthast (1857–1927) became known for his bright Impressionist renditions of beach life around New York and along the New England coast. In "Bathers,” circa 1913, he employed heavy impasto, broken brushstrokes and a high-keyed palette to depict sun-splashed women and children frolicking among frothy waves.
The silvery, evocative landscapes of Corot and paintings by Charles-Francois Daubigny, Jean-Francois Millet and Theodore Rousseau sought to capture the ephemeral effects of nature, which became a hallmark of the Barbizon School movement.
Their work influenced Realist painters like Gustave Courbet — and caught the imagination of those soon-to-be-dubbed Impressionists. When Frederic Bazille, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley traveled together to Fontainebleau in the 1860s, they depicted areas made famous by Barbizon School artists.
Courbet (1819–1877), the supreme Realist, influenced many contemporaries with his vivid, naturalistic landscapes. He began painting his famous "wave" paintings, capturing a single surge of water at the point of breaking, in the late 1860s.
Eventually, in the 1870s, a group of Parisian artists led by Monet coalesced around a more colorful and daring style of painting in depictions of nature and everyday modern life. Banding together for an 1874 exhibition that included paintings by Monet, Eugene Boudin, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley, they caught the public's attention with canvases that rendered not so much a landscape
per se
as the impression produced by a landscape.
