American Impressionism: Artistic Style & Methods

American Impressionists rarely abandoned drawing the way some of their French models did. Most had learned academic figure construction in Paris ateliers or the Munich academy, and they kept it: Chase's Carmencita (1890) and Cassatt's Boating Party (1893-94) are built on firm figures even where the paint is loose. What changed was light and touch. Robinson, Twachtman and Hassam adopted broken, high-keyed color and painted outdoors; Twachtman pushed toward pale, nearly monochrome harmonies, as in his snow and pond pictures from his Greenwich farm such as Winter Harmony; Dewing, often counted a Tonalist, set his refined women in hazy, dreamlike fields of color.

Cassatt's printmaking is the most inventive body of work here. In 1890 Paris saw a large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and Cassatt answered it with a set of ten color prints made in 1890-91 in drypoint and aquatint. She worked with several plates for each image and applied the ink to each plate by hand, so that, as the Cleveland Museum of Art notes, each impression is virtually unique. The set - The Bath, The Lamp, In the Omnibus, The Letter, The Fitting, Woman Bathing, Mother's Kiss, Maternal Caress, Afternoon Tea Party and The Coiffure - was shown at her first solo exhibition, at Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1891, and all ten are in this archive, together with several of her preparatory drawings for them. Her earlier black-and-white prints of women in opera boxes and at tea date from about 1879-1882, the years she was exhibiting with the Impressionists.

Hassam's late career was given over largely to the needle and the lithographic crayon. Most of his etchings and lithographs here date from 1915 onward: Cos Cob bridges and the Holley House, Gloucester harbors, New York skylines, and, after he bought a house in East Hampton in 1919, the elms, windmills and shingled houses of that village. Weir, who at first disliked Impressionism, became a skilled etcher - his prints here date from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s - and painted the mill towns and bridges of eastern Connecticut, including The Red Bridge over the Shetucket River.