“Girls Reading,” Edmund C. Tarbell, 1907. Shein collection.

WATERVILLE, MAINE – The Joan Whitney Payson collection has returned to the Colby College Museum of Art and will be on view through June 23. The collection of 26 works contains paintings by world-famous Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists.

Among the French artists whose works are represented in the Payson collection are Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, J.A.D. Ingres, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. Paintings, watercolors and drawings by Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler reflect American artists’ interest in the French Impressionist style. Two portraits by the Eighteenth-Century English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and two works by Andrew Wyeth add to the range of the collection.

A Payson collection website was recently developed to present background information on the artists and the paintings represented in the collection as well as group tour information for teachers who wish to take their classes to see the exhibit. The site also includes activities by grade level that teachers can do with their students before or after visiting the museum.

John Whitney Payson and his family moved the collection to the Portland Museum of Art in 1991. It is on loan to Colby for one semester every two years.

Colby museum hours are 10 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Saturday, and 2 pm to 4:30 pm Sunday. Admission is free. For information, 207-872-3228 or visit www.colby.edu/museum.