American Impressionism: Cultural & Artistic Influence

American Impressionism gave the United States a picture of itself that was settled, prosperous and modern without being raw: genteel interiors, cultivated gardens, colonial doorways, harbors full of pleasure boats, and avenues crowded with fashionable walkers. Its pictures largely leave out the tenements and factory floors of the period, which Weir's mill-town paintings only glimpse; the Ashcan painters of the following decade made that harder side of the city their subject. But the movement's quiet New England places have had a long afterlife: Florence Griswold's house in Old Lyme became the Florence Griswold Museum, Weir's Branchville farm became Weir Farm National Historical Park, and Chase's Shinnecock home and studio were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Cassatt's images of mothers and children, the subject she concentrated on almost exclusively after 1900, remain her best-known images. Hassam's flag paintings, made as the country moved toward and into the First World War, are among the best-known American pictures of the home front.