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22 Nov 2005 / 0 Comment

American Impressionism At The Bruce Museum Of Arts And Science

Published: November 22, 2005

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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

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 thelabor theme in American art have stopped short of theImpressionists or skipped over them to pick up the thread withtheir successors, the Urban Realists.” The exhibition and itscatalog are the thus the first comprehensive treatments of labor inthe 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.

Everett L Warner captured streets teeming with activity around the Fulton Fish Market with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background in Along the River Front New York 1912 Courtesy of Toledo Museum of Art

Everett L. Warner captured streets teeming with activity around the Fulton Fish Market, with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, in “Along the River Front, New York,” 1912. Courtesy of Toledo Museum of Art.

American Impressionists were also influenced by works likeJohannes Vermeer’s Dutch interiors, John Constable’s paintings ofEnglish rural life, Edgar Degas’s depictions of Parisianlaundresses and milliners, and views of manual labor in Japaneseart.

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.

During a monthlong stay in the hillsides around Carrara Italy John Singer Sargent immortalized the workers who wrested white marble from its famous quarries in Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries in Carrara circa 1911 Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

During a monthlong stay in the hillsides around Carrara, Italy, John Singer Sargent immortalized the workers who wrested white marble from its famous quarries in “Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries in Carrara,” circa 1911. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It was left to Robert Henri and his Ashcan School followers,who overlapped the Impressionists in the first two decades of theTwentieth 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.

A member of the Brown County Ind artists colony Ada Walter Shulz 18701928 turned the strenuous household chore of washing into a paean to the beauty of the outdoors and the tender bond between mother and daughter in Wash Day 1912 Collection of Robert L and Ellen E Haan

A member of the Brown County, Ind., artists’ colony, Ada Walter Shulz (1870-1928) turned the strenuous household chore of washing into a paean to the beauty of the outdoors and the tender bond between mother and daughter in “Wash Day,” 1912. Collection of Robert L. and Ellen E. Haan.

The hustle and bustle of New York’s waterfront was captured,albeit from a distance, by Everett L. Warner, who juxtaposed thefrenetic activity of men and horse-drawn rigs around the fishhouses against the Brooklyn Bridge, the towering icon of modernengineering. In “Along the River Front, New York,” 1912, Warner”portrayed the waterfront as a still-vital source of the nation’senergy,” 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.”

In John J Ennekings Duxbury Clam Digger 1892 a sturdy Yankee lad bends to the backbreaking task of digging for clams that are likely headed for the family dinner table Courtesy of Scripps College Claremont Calif

In John J. Enneking’s “Duxbury Clam Digger,” 1892, a sturdy Yankee lad bends to the back-breaking task of digging for clams that are likely headed for the family dinner table. Cour-tesy of Scripps College, Claremont, Calif.

While glossing over the gritty realities of the world aroundthem that Ashcan School painters were soon to capture, AmericanImpressionists created “some of the most engaging images of theturn of the last century,” Larkin concludes. The Impressionists”endeavored not only to make a work of art but to make an art ofwork.”

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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