Art Across the Atlantic: American Impressionism

The American Eye in Paris

In the 1870s and 1880s, a generation of American painters crossed the Atlantic and encountered Impressionism. Some, like Mary Cassatt, stayed in Paris and became part of the movement itself. Others — Chase, Hassam, Homer, Sargent — absorbed its lessons and carried them back across the ocean, where the technique encountered a different light, a different landscape, and a different social world.

What emerged was not a copy but a transformation. American Impressionism tends to be brighter, more optimistic, and more formal in its subjects than its French counterpart. Where Monet dissolved the cathedral at Rouen into pure light, Homer confronted the sea as an elemental adversary. Where Renoir painted the dancers of Montmartre, Chase painted the leisure of Tompkins Square Park.

Mary Cassatt: the Insider

Cassatt was unique among Americans in being accepted as an equal by the French Impressionist circle. Her friendship with Degas was both personal and artistic, and its influence can be seen in her high viewpoints, her cropped compositions, and her interest in the intimate world of women and children. The Child's Bath and On a Balcony, both in our current collection, demonstrate the full range of her achievement.

Winslow Homer: the Solitary

Homer never settled in France. His two-year stay in Cullercoats, on the Yorkshire coast, was more formative: from that experience of working men and women at the edge of the sea, he developed the stripped, monumental style of his great marine paintings. The Herring Net and Coast of Maine, both watercolors in our collection, show his mastery of both oil and watercolor and his understanding of the sea as something that indifferently surpasses human scale.

John Singer Sargent

If Homer was stoic and Chase was urbane, Sargent was mercurial — capable of everything, at home everywhere. His full-length portrait watercolors and his spontaneous outdoor sketches show an artist for whom technique was effortless and subject was only a pretext for the pure pleasure of paint.