American Impressionist Masterpieces

Inbunden bok. Beaux Arts Editions. 1991. 119 sidor.

Nära nyskick. Skyddsomslag i nära nyskick. The early 1890s, the style of painting known as Impressionism had become admired in the country of its birth, France, and had taken root also in the United States. At first, in the preceding decades, it had been disdained not only by the French but by some of the American artists who, receiving their academic training in Paris, would later become outstanding American Impressionist painters. The story of these artists, and the triumph in the United States of one of the most important and beloved styles of modern painting, is the subject of this beautiful volume. The American masters of Impressionism are among the greatest names in the art of the United States: John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, John Henry Twachtman, Maurice Prendergast, William Glackens, and others. Along with Mary Cassatt, the only American who exhibited with the origi- nal group of French Impressionists in Paris, they are prominently featured. Other lesser-known figures, such as Theodore Wendel, Lilian Westcott Hale, and George Hitchcock, are revealed through their stunning canvases to have been enormously gifted contributors
to the formation of an American Impressionism. The 48 magnificent full-color reproductions in this volume are accompanied by texts that make fully evi- dent the high place the selected images deserve both in the careers of their creators and within the broad Impressionist movement. The introduction, in a wealth of detail and anecdotal interest, unfolds the chronicle of the style's adaptation by the individual painters who were influenced by it. Each artist, in his or her own way, took up the themes, motifs, and techniques of Impressionism and produced something fresh and delightful to behold. This volume makes each development traceable in the pictures and shows, again and again, how a uniquely American Impressionism resulted.

LISA N. PETERs is the Director of Research at Spanierman Gallery in New York City. She is the co-author, with Ira Spanierman, of a forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works of Twachtman. A graduate of Col- orado College, and currently completing her Ph.D. in art history at the City University of New York, Ms. Peters has contributed essays to publications of the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of the City of New York. Her articles have appeared in Arts Magazine, Print Collector's Newsletter, and Vantage Point.

JACKET ILLUSTRATION:
Robert Vonnoh, In Flander's Field (Detail) (1890). Oil on canvas.
The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio