7. “Nothing but Daubs”: The Translation of Impressionism in the United States

Burns​, Emily C.

Save Cite Share

Free

7. “Nothing but Daubs”: The Translation of Impressionism in the United States

Emily C. Burns

Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism

The Seventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago from October to December...

Author

Emily C. Burns

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.010

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20008

Chapter subject tags:Impressionism (Art)--United StatesArt criticism--United States--History--19th centuryArt--Public opinion--United States--History--19th centuryPainting, American--European influencesRobinson, Theodore, 1852-1896Garland, Hamlin, 1860-1940Henri, Robert, 1865-1929Landscape painting, American--19th centuryMeteyard, Thomas Buford, 1865-1928Taft, Lorado, 1860-1936Psychology and art--United States--19th centuryVonnoh, Robert William, 1858-1933

7. “Nothing but Daubs”: The Translation of Impressionism in the United States

Emily C. Burns

The Seventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago from October to December 1894, featured three hundred paintings and forty sculptures installed throughout four rooms and a corridor on the second floor of its new building. The catalogue announced its compilation of “the conservative, the progressive, and the advanced radical schools of modern art,” hinting at the inclusion of academic painters alongside artists who experimented with impressionism.1 Catalogue of the Seventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, October 29 to December 17, 1894 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1894), 9. The Chicago Tribune noted the apparent “progress among American artists, from the sta[u]nchest conservatism to the most pronounced impressionism,” remarking that “men who a few years ago resented the then new impressionistic school without reservation have yielded to the fascinations of representing strong light and using brilliant color.”2 “View Works of Art: Seventh Annual Exhibition Shown to the Press,” Chicago Tribune, October 25, 1894, 3. For this reviewer, even “the American section of fine arts at the World’s Fair [the previous year in Chicago] did not afford as good an opportunity to study American impressionism.”3 “View Works of Art,” 3. On the “retreat” from impressionism at the World’s Columbian Exposition, see Janice Simon, “The Promise of 1893,” in Crosscurrents in American Impressionism at the Turn of the Century, ed. William U. Eiland, Donald Keyes, and Janice Simon (Athens: University of Georgia, 1996), 8.

Critics spent much column space debating U.S. artists’ adoptions of impressionist approaches such as the use of bright colors, loose brushwork, plein-air study, and attention to ephemeral light effects. Many writers self-identified as translators of impressionism for the wider and puzzled public.4 See especially Hamlin Garland, Lorado Taft, and Charles Browne [A Critical Triumvirate, pseud.], Impressions on Impressionism (Chicago: Central Art Association, 1894); James William Pattison, “The Impressionists at the Chicago Art Institute,” undated clipping; “American Pictures,” unknown clipping; and “Artists of America: Chicago’s Annual Exhibition of Beautiful Canvases,” Interocean (Chicago), undated clipping, all in Robert Vonnoh scrapbook, private collection, Gainesville, Fla. For instance, one visitor could be heard to complain, in reference to the textured surfaces and unfinished quality of impressionist facture, that the exhibition amounted to “nothing but daubs.” When this overheard comment appeared in print, the reporter defended the movement by claiming, “While Chicago has never had an exhibition quite so impressionistic it has certainly never had one more beautiful.”5 “Many Fine Pictures: Seventh Annual Exhibition of the American Artists,” unknown newspaper, October 28, 1894, Vonnoh scrapbook.

Discussion of the 1894 exhibition was extended by the contemporaneous publication of a pamphlet called Impressions on Impressionism that imagined “a critical triumvirate” responding to the diversity of artistic expression on view. The text was constructed as a play, with a series of staged dialogues in the exhibition galleries between a novelist, a sculptor, and a “conservative painter”—all of whom were leaders in the Central Art Association, a Chicago-based arts organization.6 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism; “Art in the West: Central Art Association of America’s Effort at Education,” unknown clipping, Vonnoh scrapbook, 92; William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1980), 31; and Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 137–40. These personas represented the real-life sculptor Lorado Taft, the novelist Hamlin Garland, and the “conservative” landscape artist and Brush and Pencil editor Charles Francis Browne.7 On Browne, who submitted On the Border of Bass Lake, Indiana—Smoky Weather to the exhibition, see Melissa Wolfe and Joel Dryer, “Charles Francis Browne (1859–1920),” Illinois Historical Art Project, https://bit.ly/2E25iIZ. Taft had trained in Paris as an academic sculptor and, since 1886, had taught at the Art Institute of Chicago; he sympathized with modernist innovations.8 See Allen Stuart Weller and Lorado Taft, Lorado in Paris: The Letters of Lorado Taft, 1880–1885 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Allen Stuart Weller and Robert G. La France, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014). Garland, Taft’s brother-in-law, insistently supported artists and writers who were working to find a particular U.S. character through modernist experimentation.9 See Keith Newlin, Hamlin Garland: A Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). He promoted the U.S. Midwest and West as sites for developing an art practice potentially freer from European influences than the northeastern United States.10 Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work, 120. Just before the Chicago exhibition opened, Garland published a collection of essays entitled Crumbling Idols, in which he claimed the need to supersede outmoded European conventions by adapting them to U.S. models, which would better emphasize “the mighty pivotal present.”11 Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art and Literature (1894; repr., Gainesville, Fla: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1952), viii. On Garland’s discussion of impressionism and attempts to apply it to his writing style, see James B. Stronks, “A Realist Experiments with Impressionism: Hamlin Garland’s ‘Chicago Studies,’” American Literature 36, no. 1 (March 1964): 38–52; and Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work, 140–43.

As a movement, “American impressionism” was institutionalized by a group of well-established northeastern painters known as “the Ten” in 1898, more than twenty years after the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.12Katherine M. Bourguignon, “Painting Impressionism in America,” in American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1900, ed. Katherine M. Bourguignon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 37–47; Gerdts, American Impressionism, 27–31; William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (New York: Abbeville, 1984); Nancy Mowll Mathews, “Monet and the Americans: Whose Impressionism?,” in Monet and American Impressionism, ed. Dulce Román (Gainesville, Fla.: Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, 2015), 27–45; Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 220–90; Julia Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging: New England Art and the Making of American Identity (Ithaca, N.Y:. Cornell University Press, 2006), 96–150; and Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters (Munich: Prestel, 1991). On the circulation of French impressionism in the United States, see Eric M. Zafran, “Monet in America,” in Claude Monet (1840–1926): A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff, ed. Odile Poncet (New York: Wildenstein, 2007), 80–152; Claire Hendren, “Impressionist Art in Private Clubs: The Case Study of the Union League Club (1886–1902),” Transatlantica 2 (2017), https://bit.ly/30AE6c3; Claire Hendren, “French Impressionism in the United States’ Greater Midwest: The 1907–8 Traveling Exhibition,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 18, no. 2 (Spring 2019), https://bit.ly/39isI8p; Michael Leja, “Monet’s Modernity in New York in 1886,” American Art 14, no. 1 (2000): 51–79; and Jennifer A. Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” in Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market, ed. Sylvie Patry (London: National Gallery, 2015), 136–51. While the Society of American Artists had been created in 1877 to challenge the conservatism of the National Academy of Design by embracing more avant-garde styles, in 1898 the Ten reaffirmed the need to broaden exhibition spaces to foreground styles such as impressionism.13Jennifer Martin Bienenstock, “The Formation and Early Years of the Society of American Artists, 1877–1884” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1983); and Kevin Sharp, “Independence and the Durability of American Impressionism,” in Amanda C. Burdan, ed., America’s Impressionism: Echoes of a Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 109–12.These minor and belated ruptures were more moderate than the strident anti-establishment attitude of the French impressionists two decades earlier. The term “impressionism” was often employed to describe the main stylistic tenets of the French movement and was applied to U.S. artists who had spent time abroad, but it also broadly encompassed art practices that seemed generally idiosyncratic, non-formulaic, or experimental. As critic Cecilia Waern noted in 1892, “The word itself is elastic, and covers a variety of significations.”14Cecilia Waern, “Some Notes on French Impressionism,” Atlantic Monthly 69, no. 414 (April 1892): 535. The 1894 exhibition and its reception reveal the breadth of the term’s application and the number of artists—even beyond the Ten—who were experimenting with impressionist aesthetics. Of the painters who, four years later, would compose the Ten, only Frank Benson and Edmund Tarbell were included in the 1894 exhibition. Other featured artists interested in impressionist aesthetics were Thomas Hovenden, who brightened his palette and loosened brushwork at the end of his career; John White Alexander, who submitted a series of large-scale portraits of women with titles emphasizing his color palettes; and Robert Henri, who experimented briefly with impressionism before embracing other styles.15Anne Terhune, Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 175–81. On Alexander, see Sarah J. Moore, John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880–1915 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003); and Mary Anne Goley, John White Alexander: An American Artist in the Gilded Age (London: Philip Wilson, 2018). Both the exhibition and its critical reception suggest the need for a more porous and inclusive definition of U.S. impressionism framed around eclecticism and adaptation, rather than founded upon a center-periphery model privileging French art and artists.

This essay traces three threads of commentary raised by the 1894 exhibition that reveal how impressionism was translated within a U.S. context in the 1890s: the celebration of artists’ grounding in local landscapes, understood as signifiers of the nation; an investment in an individuated vision—implied by “daubs”—that highlighted individuality without necessitating the wholesale rejection of established art institutions; and a focus on the dichotomy between multiplicity and unity in the encounter between self and world. The latter discourse bears affinity with the ongoing psychological and philosophical inquiries of William James. Multiplicity and unity pertained to the collective set of individual paintings displayed at the 1894 Chicago exhibition. However, this discourse also could be applied to the internal dynamics of a single painting as the multiplicity of individual brushstrokes cohered to form a united and singular image. Furthermore, it inferred individuated perspectives of viewers as well as artists; for example, the structure of Impressions on Impressionism as a play presented the range of viewing responses that one might have in the galleries as analogous to the wide range of artistic experimentation on display. As visual and textual thought-experiments, the paintings and the art criticism explore links between individual subjectivity and collective understanding. The speculative interrogation of unique human perspectives and experiences undergirds both late nineteenth-century art criticism and James’s contemporaneous writings. While both James’s ideas and the concept of impressionism in the United States were in flux in the 1880s and 1890s, the final section of this essay speculates on overlaps in the fields of psychology and art when it came to exploring perception, cognition, and sensation in the modern world.

“DISTINCTLY AMERICAN TONE”

As the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an increased number of U.S. artists studying in Paris, in the 1890s U.S. critics expressed deep anxiety about the French influence on U.S. art.16 Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990); H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville, 1991); and Kathleen Adler, Erica E. Hirshler, and H. Barbara Weinberg, Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 (London: National Gallery, 2006). Drawing on an adage from the French writer Alfred de Musset, critic Charles De Kay complained in 1891: “Sheltering themselves under the convenient saying that art has no country, our painters either remain abroad and paint Europe, or return to their own land and paint Europe still.” Nothing annoyed De Kay more than artists who tried “to paint America through French spectacles.”17 Charles De Kay, “Mr. Chase and Central Park,” Harper’s Weekly, May 2, 1891, 327. Fearing the adulteration of U.S. art by French styles, he encouraged the adaptation of style to suit local landscapes. He celebrated, for example, William Merritt Chase’s smoothly painted depictions of Central Park, with their attention to the light effects and color of the natural environs without the thick impasto of French impressionist painting.18 See Barbara Dayer Gallati, William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes, 1886–1890 (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1999).

Critics of the 1894 exhibition were even more open to the idea of artists translating international styles, as long as they depicted local settings. The Chicago Tribune announced the “distinctly American Tone in the Subjects”—a claim somehow compatible with the article’s comment that the exhibition displayed a “cosmopolitan breadth of subject and treatment” that included “the influence of the impressionist[s].”19 “Work of the Artists: Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture,” Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1894, 8. While this anonymous writer noted artists’ visible engagement with international iconography and styles, it was the paintings’ subjects that lent a perceptible “American Tone” to the exhibition. Garland, who found impressionism compelling precisely because it encouraged artists to ground themselves in the local, which he considered a metonym for the national, was the most vocal promoter of this position. In Crumbling Idols he argued that impressionism was “reinvigorating art in every nation of Europe” and concluded that “art, to be vital, must be local in its subject; its universal appeal must be in its working out—in the way it is done.”20 Garland, Crumbling Idols, ix, 131. For Garland, as for the Chicago Tribune contributor, the cosmopolitan style of impressionism was adapted when an artist depicted a local subject. As art historian Michael Rosenthal has observed in his studies of British landscape, “the idea persists that the image of the nation is the image of its landscape.”21 Michael Rosenthal, “Introduction,” in Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–1880, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 11. Critics’ emphasis on U.S. subjects in the 1894 exhibition reinforced this connection.

Theodore Robinson’s painting Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal enacted a dialogue with Garland’s ideals (fig. 1). Robinson had lived in Giverny from 1884 to 1892; upon his return to the United States, he sought to cultivate a spirit of the local akin to Claude Monet’s engagements with the Normandy landscape.22 See Sona Johnston, In Monet’s Light: Theodore Robinson at Giverny (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005). After extended dialogues with his friend Garland and exchanges of paintings, books, and the pamphlet Impressions on Impressionism, Robinson argued that the quality of light changed with different locations and that impressionist techniques rendered those differences visible.23 H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 58. Robinson wrote that Impressions on Impressionism was “witty and sensible and suggestive—the sort of thing that ought to do good.” Theodore Robinson Diaries, December 19, 1894, Frick Art Reference Library, New York. Cited in Susan G. Larkin, American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work (Greenwich, Conn.: Bruce Museum of Arts, 2005), 53, 181n10. Garland intended to display Robinson’s original paintings in his lectures as demonstration pieces of the adaptation of impressionism in the United States. Writing to Garland in 1894, Robinson explained that he sought to abandon tradition and apply the principles of fresh vision to representations of his own, local landscapes.24 Hamlin Garland, “Theodore Robinson,” Brush and Pencil 4, no. 6 (September 1899): 285. See also Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism, 317n37; and Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, 97–98. He told Garland that he had “got back to what I believe is my country. . . . I am only beginning to see its beauties and possibilities and to feel that affection for a country, so indispensable to paint it well.”25 Theodore Robinson to Hamlin Garland, November 14, 1895, Hamlin Garland Collection, University of Southern California–Los Angeles, cited in Weinberg, Bolger and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism, 58. Robinson connected grounding in space, emotional connection to place, and successful painting. As he sought to depict signifiers of the local, which he described as “the mysterious quality in the landscapes of one’s native place,” he defined his practice as producing “Native American Art.”26 Garland, “Theodore Robinson,” 285; Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism, 317n35. Robinson does not seem to imply Native Americans with his use of the term “Native.”

~

Description: Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal by Robinson, Theodore

Fig. 1. Theodore Robinson, Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal, 1893. Oil on canvas, 71.8 × 81.9 cm (28 1/4 × 32 1/4 in.). Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1900.5, Gift of the Society of American Artists as a memorial to Theodore Robinson.

In 1893 he brought students on a plein-air painting trip to the antiquated canal lock in Napanoch, in upstate New York. In his diary, he described Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal as an “emancipation from old formulae and ideas of what is interesting or beautiful from the European standpoint.”27 Robinson Diaries, October 29, 1893, cited in Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism, 69. He transformed an industrial subject into a natural one, building a rustic scene with the parked boat, low-railed fencing, and unpaved footpaths on both sides of the canal. Like French impressionist artists, Robinson aestheticized the industrial with a quietude reminiscent of pastoral landscape traditions.28 On French impressionist depictions of industry, see James H. Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). With a low horizon line, he dedicated much of the composition to the cloud formations that permitted him to build and represent the locally determined effects of ephemeral light.

Employing loose brushwork and vibrant colors, Robinson seemed to eschew foreign influence and succeeded in drawing critical attention to U.S. subjects. In Impressions on Impressionism, both the novelist and the “conservative painter” extolled local landscapes like Robinson’s; the latter (Browne), for example, argued, “We will never have any home art with the real home flavor unless we are in close touch with what’s around us here. . . . American art must be developed by the artists in happy sympathy with American surroundings, and supported by a public loving the home things more than imported foreign sentiment.” Garland agreed: “We can’t go on doing imitations and taking notes abroad.”29 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 23. For both, Robinson’s insistence on recognizably local landscapes reinforced this translation of impressionism.

“FINDING INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION”: INDIVIDUATION AND STYLE

Critics also responded to the 1894 Chicago exhibition with an attention to how impressionism recorded and valorized individual perception. While the markers of impressionism—loose brushwork, bright colors, and attention to ephemeral light effects—gradually became formulaic, they nonetheless signified a unique vision translated to canvas. Because the style implied a potentially infinite array of grounded subjectivities, many critics saw it as liberated from formula.30 Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 222; Mathews, “Monet and the Americans,” 33. On subjectivity in impressionism, see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3–13. Reviewers sought evidence of diverse perception on the canvas surface. Individualism thereby became a way to disentangle influence and innovation. This discourse around individualism was pronounced in the United States, which had already developed a culture rooted in self-reliance.31 On impressionism and independence, see Stephen F. Eisenman, “The Intransigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got Their Name,” in The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886, ed. Charles S. Moffett (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 51–59. On the myth of individualism in the United States, see Aaron Barlow, The Cult of American Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth (Westport, Conn.: ABC-CLIO, 2013); Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Allan Gardner Smith, “Stephen Crane, Impressionism and William James,” Revue française d’études américaines 17 (May 1983): 240. In his lecture at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner codified these characteristics of “dominant individualism” that shaped experiences and representations of U.S. landscapes.32 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 59. See also Simon, “Promise of 1893,” 15. Whereas the French impressionists notoriously rebelled against established institutions such as the Salon and the École des beaux-arts, U.S. impressionists experimented with style without firmly departing from the equivalent institutions. In spite of some reshuffling and movement between academic and dealer spaces, U.S. impressionism signified individuality more than institutional independence.33 Sharp, “Independence and the Durability of American Impressionism,” 109–12. My thanks to Alexis Clark for honing in on this subtlety.

For his part, Garland held that each artist’s handling resembled a kind of personal signature. Impressionism thus became—paradoxically—an individualized formula. In his introduction to Crumbling Idols, Garland cited an artist’s (perhaps Robinson’s) interaction with Monet as the source of this speculative approach: “There came a young man to Monet, saying, ‘Master, teach me to paint.’ To which Monet replied, ‘I do not teach painting; I make paintings. There has never been, and there never will be, but one teacher: there she is!’ and with one sweep of his arm he showed the young man the splendor of meadow and sunlight. ‘Go, learn of her, and listen to all she will say to you.’”34 Garland, Crumbling Idols, viii. Likewise, in his own celebration of nature as the artist’s sole instructor, Garland promoted “individuality in authorship and . . . freedom from past models.”35 Garland, Crumbling Idols, 21. See also Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work, 127, 135–36. At the 1894 exhibition, Garland highlighted paintings revealing artists’ individual experiences of nature and happily concluded that “there are very few pictures here with Monet’s brush-stroke imitated in them.”36 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 23.

Garland especially appreciated the two landscape paintings of Atlantic City, New Jersey, submitted by Henri, then working in an impressionist mode. Having just returned to the United States from France, Henri’s Beach at Atlantic City (exhibited as Sunny Day, Atlantic City) adopted a bright palette and abundant layers of paint to create a densely worked surface: the impasto is so thick with white, tan, pink, blue, yellow, and red-orange strokes that few patches of bare canvas appear, lending the painting an expressionistic touch as it implies momentary perception on the crowded beach (fig. 2). The copious surface layers and the dark black in the umbrellas anticipate his later brushwork and palette as a member of the Ashcan School. In Impressions on Impressionism, Garland pointed out Sunny Day, Atlantic City, to defend impressionism to a skeptical viewer: “To suggest a crowd of people in the blaze of sunshine with so few strokes is mighty fine work.” Referring to the textured foreground, Garland directed visitors to “see how he lays his paint on.” Taft concurred that Henri’s painting resembled a relief sculpture.37 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 3. Garland and Taft lauded Henri’s painting with its thickly textured surface and attention to fleeting light effects as an ideal example of an individual adaptation of impressionist aesthetics. They also noted that Henri’s approach varied among the paintings he submitted, comparing the Atlantic City paintings and their dense layers with the feathery brushstrokes of Landscape with Figure in Pink (1893). His individuality, then, registered across his own oeuvre as well as in comparison with other artists.

~

Description: Beach at Atlantic City by Henri, Robert

Fig. 2. Robert Henri, Beach at Atlantic City, 1893. Oil on canvas, 30.5 × 45.7 cm (12 × 18 in.). Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James Beattie, 1961.157.

Thomas Buford Meteyard’s paintings further showcased an individual translation of impressionism. Having spent time in both Paris and Giverny, Meteyard had recently exhibited landscapes in Paris at the second and third exhibitions of Peintres impressionistes et symbolistes, which were held in the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery in 1892.38 Pierre Sanchez, ed., Les expositions de la galerie le Barc de Boutteville (1891–1899) et du salon des cent (1894–1903): Répertoire des artistes et liste de leurs oeuvres (Dijon: L’Echelle de Jacob, 2012), 353. On Meteyard, see Nicholas Kilmer, Thomas Buford Meteyard (1865–1928): Paintings and Watercolors (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1989); Bronwyn A. E. Griffith, Thomas Buford Meteyard: Un américain chez les Nabis (Giverny: Musée d’art américain and Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2004); and David B. Dearinger, Thomas Buford Meteyard (1865–1928): Travels through Impressionism (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 2017). At the Art Institute of Chicago in 1894, he balanced French and U.S. subjects in his impressionist experiments. In submitting a Giverny impressionist painting, Morning: Valley of the Seine—possibly the painting known today as The Banks of the Seine—Meteyard proclaimed a link with the French movement (fig. 3).39 See Katherine M. Bourguignon, ed., Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885–1915 (Giverny: Musée d’art américain, 2007); and William H. Gerdts, Monet’s Giverny: An Impressionist Colony (New York: Abbeville, 1993). In this canvas, the artist employed feathery, vertical brushstrokes to define cypress trees on one side of the Seine and slashes of blue-gray paint to define the water current breaking the reflection in the river below. Meteyard’s open brushwork and attention to light effects imply his attempts to build a sense of evanescence. Yet he also included two U.S. landscapes painted with other stylistic approaches among his submissions. After moving back to Scituate, Massachusetts, in 1893, he began to depict the dunes and marshes in watercolor, using Japonist asymmetrical cropping, outlining, and unmodulated planes of color, as seen in From the Dunes, Scituate (1893–94).

~

Description: The Banks of the Seine by Meteyard, Thomas Buford

Fig. 3. Thomas Buford Meteyard, The Banks of the Seine, c. 1890–93. Oil on canvas, 31.7 × 40.6 cm (12 1/2 × 16 in.). Mark Murray Fine Paintings, New York.

Meteyard’s reception indicates how U.S. critics linked French training, impressionist technique, and individuated perception. While they described him as a “disciple” and “follower” of impressionism, critics concluded that Meteyard’s “wanderings about Paris” had taught him that “the only true god is the god of light, and that Monet is his prophet. . . . He has studied his art but little in the schools, following Monet’s doctrine that a painter should develop his own individuality.”40 Untitled clippings, Chicago Herald, October 25 and October 26, 1894, Thomas B. Meteyard scrapbook, private collection, Bexhill, UK. As with Garland, critics underscored how the general principles of impressionism could be interpreted idiosyncratically, and used this idea to mitigate any claims that Meteyard had been influenced by French art.

In Impressions on Impressionism, the authors commented on the diverse submissions of artists such as Henri and Meteyard to draw attention to individuality. About submissions by another painter, Albert Herter, Taft rhetorically questioned: “Isn’t it a triumph, when an artist can do two things so different and both so good?”41 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 6. Critics also noted divergences among the impressionist-inspired submissions. Comparing Beach at Atlantic City and The Banks of the Seine, for instance, neither the brushstrokes nor the choice of color schemes seem like the product of a single artist. For this reason, Garland considered the exhibition a key moment in the process of casting aside influences: “What pleases me about the Exposition is that while the principle of impressionism is almost everywhere it is finding individual expression. Henri and Herter, and [Theodore C.] Steele, and [Edmund] Tarbell, and [Robert] Vonnoh, and Robinson all have a different touch—they are gaining mastery of an individual technique. This shows we’re pulling out of the imitative stage.”42 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 23. Chicago-based news columnists tended to come to similar conclusions. For example, when the Chicago Post made a list of exhibitors who engaged with impressionist aesthetics, the paper insisted that the artists were “all influenced in different ways by the new movement.”43 “About Art and Artists,” Chicago Post, October 26, 1894, Vonnoh scrapbook, 6. While impressionism became a shared visual language, these painters were not seen as a coherent school or formal group; rather, each artist’s individuality of touch registered as unique.

“A TEEMING MULTIPLICITY OF OBJECTS AND RELATIONS”

Such attention to a multiplicity of individual styles intersected with rising psychological and philosophical currents in the United States coalescing around William James, whose developing ideas of pragmatism celebrated perceptual inquiry as it highlighted individual perspectives and contingencies in nature. In dialogue with the French philosopher Henri Bergson and his concept of the élan vital, pragmatism centered on the dynamism within the exterior world and within human experience. Both James and Bergson emphasized multiplicity and continual transformation.44 By the early twentieth century, Bergson and James had read each other’s writings and exchanged letters about their overlapping ideas. See Henri Bergson, Sur le pragmatisme de William James, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011); and Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 338–51. Both Bergson and James, as well as other philosophers, noted nuanced distinctions between their perspectives, however, such as Bergson’s greater focus on time (Perry, Thought and Character, 340). See also Walter B. Pitkin, “James and Bergson: Or, Who Is Against Intellect?,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 7, no. 9 (April 28, 1910): 225–31; Horace Meyer Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914); and Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 27.

A discussion of the contiguity between James’s thinking and the discourse around impressionism in the United States is necessarily speculative and inconclusive.45 Other scholars have made suggestive connections between James’s ideas and art during this period. See Emily Gephart, “Sensation and Suggestion: William James and Sadakichi Hartmann’s Symbolist Aesthetics,” William James Studies 13, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 167–89; Elizabeth Doe Stone, “Mobility and the Matter of Memory: John Singer Sargent’s Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife,” Art History 42, no. 3 (June 2019): 550–51; Smith, “Stephen Crane, Impressionism and William James”; Emily Fourmy Cutrer, “A Pragmatic Mode of Seeing: James, Howells, and the Politics of Vision,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 259–75; Henry Adams, “William James, Henry James, John La Farge, and the Foundations of Radical Empiricism,” American Art Journal 17, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 60–67; Marc Simpson, “Painting Softly: An Introduction,” in Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly, ed. Marc Simpson (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008), 4, 13–14; Cody Hartley, “True Illusion in Soft Paintings,” in Simpson, Like Breath on Glass, 75–79; Eliza Jane Reilly, “Concrete Possibilities: William James and the European Avant-Garde,” Streams of William James 2, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 22–29; and Eugene Taylor, “The Interior Landscape: George Inness and William James on Art from a Swedenborgian Point of View,” Archives of American Art Journal 37, nos. 1/2 (1997): 2–10. Artists and critics did not mention James directly, and he did not likely see or comment on this exhibition. Furthermore, many of his ideas were not fully understood or widely embraced until the second decade of the twentieth century. But Principles of Psychology was published in 1890, and James’s developing work circulated through lectures and shorter articles prior to this date. From the standpoint of intellectual history, the discourse around U.S. impressionism resonates with philosophical debates probing the relationship between perception, consciousness, and the external world.46 On constructions of vision, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). Impressionism in the United States emphasized the same themes of continual novelty, the temporality of nature, and the subjectivity of embodied observation that had occupied U.S. writers since Ralph Waldo Emerson.47 Olaf Hansen, Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect: American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). James may have been attuned to these connections due to his brief foray into painting in his early life in Boston or through correspondence with his brother, Henry, who frequently wrote art criticism, itself a burgeoning and speculative field.48 Adams, “William James, Henry James,” 65.

In Principles of Psychology, James articulated his meditations on temporality, on human consciousness as “stream of thought,” and on the contingency of experience between mind and world: “The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention.”49 William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; repr., New York: Dover, 1950), 1:288. See also Richard Shusterman, “The Pragmatist Aesthetics of William James,” British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 4 (October 2011): 347–61; and Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 60–63. James defined interior experience as a process of selecting, rejecting, and synthesizing stimuli from the external world. In 1890 he wrote that “consciousness . . . is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations.”50 James, Principles of Psychology, 1:224. The impressionist practice of selecting salient aspects with suggestive vagueness based on perceptions of nature resonates with this pragmatist model of observation and cognition. The moment of representation within an impressionist work, which implies a moment of encounter between individual and world, paralleled such a model.51 One historian likened James’s concept of the “shimmering of consciousness” to “an Impressionist canvas—no hard contours, but fringes around every object or cluster, all of them aglow with the feeling of interest, with meaning.” Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 45. Turning to an artistic metaphor as an example, James continued, “The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”52 James, Principles of Psychology, 1:224. The world and the possible human perceptions of it were presented as being as eclectic as the range of perspectives displayed in the 1894 exhibition, and James’s psychological inquiries parallel the claims that critics made about the plurality of impressionist visual expression.

By the early twentieth century, James would argue that there was no objective reality, only a world in constant flux and its dynamic perception by individuals, a “world of concrete personal experiences” that is “multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed.”53 William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 10. Analyzing the relationships between parts and whole, James focused on the multiplicity of constituent parts rather than their possible unity; he argued, “Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the world’s unity . . . but what about the variety in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter?”54 James, Pragmatism, 56. In his 1895 essay “The Knowing of Things Together,” James had already started to probe the question of how the human mind understands parts and wholes. He suggested a near simultaneity in which, for instance, one can perceive letters as part of words, finding resonance between “the oneness and the manyness.”55 James, Pragmatism, 60; William James, “The Knowing of Things Together” (1895), in Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 371–400. Garland’s definition of impressionism paralleled Jamesian inquiry; as literary historian Donald Pizer has observed, “Just as William James’s pragmatism established a pluralistic universe in which the individual is the source of truth, so Garland conceived of artistic truth as pluralistic and as centered in the individual artist.”56 Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work, 127. In Crumbling Idols, Garland wrote: “Impressionism, in its deeper sense, means the statement of one’s own individual perception of life and nature, guided by devotion to truth. Second to this great principle is the law that each impression must be worked out faithfully on separate canvases, each work of art complete in itself. . . . The higher art would seem to be the art that perceives and states the relations of things, giving atmosphere and relative values as they appeal to the sight.”57 Garland, Crumbling Idols, 50. Garland’s definition of impressionism underscored individual perception as faithfully recorded and emphasized singularity and multiplicity in this art’s attention to “the relations of things.” He highlighted the “unified impression,” a “complete and of course momentary concept of the sense of sight.”58 Garland, Crumbling Idols, 122. Because of its relation to individuated experience, the number of possible impressionist images was boundless. In his projection for future art-making, Garland forecasted that “in the space of that word ‘difference’ lies all the infinite range of future art,” with “difference” as the “vitalizing quality” of artistic development.59 Garland, Crumbling Idols, 78. Like James’s “variety,” Garland’s concept of “difference” guaranteed a united multiplicity.

The reception of the 1894 exhibition brought greater public attention to the multiplicities of consciousness and representation. The diversity of the impressionist pictures registered one type of multiplicity in which style demarcates personal, subjective engagements with a dynamic world; the inclusion of more academic paintings, in tandem with a range of styles and subjects on display, also acted as parts within a cohesive whole. The Chicago Tribune reviewer commended the “most pleasing ensemble” in which “the bright and joyous impressionistic tints which prevail, in the language of artists ‘hold the whole together’ in an exceptionally agreeable fashion.”60 “View Works of Art,” 3. Impressionism thus acted as the mortar that held together the exhibition’s range of styles.

The correspondence between the individual brushstrokes and the total image within individual paintings enacted a relationship between part and whole. Benson’s Firelight (1893) received extended discussion in these terms (fig. 4). The painting depicts a female figure in a chair in an interior space, illuminated by a fire and casting a shadowy form on the wall behind her. The artist portrayed the contingency of the visual effects of firelight, which one reviewer described as “an eccentric bit of lighting”: “the fire is not seen, but its glow suffuses the pretty young woman who is warming her shapely hands at it.”61 “Gems of Art on View,” Chicago Post, October 24, 1894, Vonnoh scrapbook, 3. See also William H. Gerdts, “Frank Benson: His Own Man—A Study of the Artist’s Development and Its Critical Reception,” in Frank W. Benson: The Impressionist Years, ed. John Wilmerding et al. (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1988), 36–38. The mass of broken, colored strokes was to be merged by the viewers’ eyes. In Impressions on Impressionism both Taft and Garland discussed this painting in terms of an oscillation of perception between surface and picture. Garland began, “It is masterly. I don’t know of anything finer in the way of firelight. See the simplicity of his method. That hand and arm is painted with three broad strokes of the brush, but it takes genius to do that.”62 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 10. Taft gushed in reply, “See how it is done! See your effect of fire light now. Look at that arm. A stripe of pure vermillion and then next to it one of clean, vivid blue, and then this mass of transparent shadow. You step back three steps and they blend into the tenderest gradations, but preserve a purity that you don’t see once a year in painting.”63 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 10. Garland and Taft considered how individual strokes of color operate collectively to build light effects. They further linked the minute and the unity to a feedback loop between seeing and representing.

~

Fig. 4. Frank Benson, Firelight, 1893. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 76.2 cm (40 × 30 in.). Private collection, sold by Berry-Hill Galleries, New York.

For Taft, producing paintings involved a continuous process of knowing and unknowing and of recognizing one’s dynamic subject position. Taft suggested that painters encourage the public to view the world differently: “He has looked and seen; you never did before, nor would now had it not been for him.”64 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 9. In this reading of impressionism, the artist intervened in the eye of the viewer, who can take on the artist’s viewing position in place and time in a moment of shared yet always distinct subjectivity. In a nod to the contingency of knowledge, Taft offered, “How little we know definitely at all!”65 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 8. An “eminent painter” intervened in support—“An impression of the scene is really far truer than all of the actual facts”—implying that the ephemerality and subjectivity of the pictures allowed for the same type of contingency underlying James’s understanding of experience.66 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 16.

Robert Vonnoh’s Discovered, presently titled The Ring, also led to discussions of the relationship between impressionism and multiplicity (fig. 5). The large painting depicts four women in a sun-infused landscape, gathering around a tree to converse, two of them holding tennis rackets. Returning from France in 1891, Vonnoh made several plein-air sketches outside Boston for this painting and then completed it in the studio.67 May Hill Brawley, Grez Days: Robert Vonnoh in France (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1987), 30–34. It was the most frequently discussed impressionist painting in the exhibition, characterized by what one critic described as “impressions as vigorous and as vivid as possible.”68 “American Pictures.” The scale of Vonnoh’s impressionist statement led one critic to celebrate how “he has hewn out a path for himself, along which his feet and no others seem capable of treading just now.”69 “Many Fine Pictures.” Another reviewer described the setting, in which “the sun can play artistic pranks with their figures and the half-shaded grass, and the distant landscape that is seen through red and blue streaky Monetish branches.”70 “Gems of Art on View.”

~

Description: The Ring by Vonnoh, Robert William

Fig. 5. Robert Vonnoh, The Ring, 1892. Oil on canvas, 153 × 184 cm (60 3/16 × 72 3/8 in.). Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico.

Stylistically and iconographically, Vonnoh’s painting resonated with James’s constructions of contingency and multiplicity. The Chicago Tribune reviewer declared Vonnoh to be “committed unequivocally to impressionism”; for this observer, the painting insisted upon viewers’ responses, as it is “so boldly bright” that it “especially challenges the eye.”71 “View Works of Art,” 3. The challenge, for critic James William Pattison, was for viewers to stand back far enough to allow the brushstrokes to merge into a “naturalness” in which the paint registers as an image to the human eye.72 Pattison, “Impressionists at the Chicago Art Institute.” On Pattison, see Wendy Greenhouse, “James William Pattison,” M. Christine Schwartz Collection, https://bit.ly/2WH2gR8. In this way, the viewer’s movement in space literalizes the transition in perception between part and whole. Pattison found Vonnoh’s unraveling of the parts to be contentious but bold; he mused about the time that would need to elapse before future audiences would marvel at such pictures. In Impressions on Impressionism, Browne critiqued Vonnoh’s “mosaic background” with a complaint that parallels the disapproving commentaries France Fowle uncovers in British criticism objecting to the Glasgow Boys' mosaic-like, decorative impressionism. In turn, Taft defended the broken brushstrokes in Vonnoh's painting with the contention that “every one of the dabs mean something in the toute ensemble.”73 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 6. In other words, transition between the fragmentary brushstrokes and the “naturalness” of the image represented a perceptual synthesis and a visual unity. As in James’s psychological model, such fragments operated as unique signifiers of individual perceptual experience of external stimuli.74 On James’s interest in multiplicity and the fragment, see Hansen, Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect, 180.

Vonnoh’s rendering of the dialogue between the four women reinforces their unique subject positions; there is limited action, but expression emphasizes their contingent perspectives. Vonnoh used countenance and pose, for example, to show emotion—the shyness of the seated woman at center with her shoulders raised and hands folded on her lap, the bold interventions of the woman behind her who leans forward to talk over her to the seated woman on the ground, the distance of the woman standing in the shadow at left, listening quietly while chewing on a piece of grass. Their interrelationship is loosely defined within the dynamic, sun-dappled landscape that seems to shift around them. This demarcated subject position reinforced the underlying concepts that animate both impressionism in the United States and Jamesian constructs of experience. Vonnoh’s iconography reinforced attention to contingency and perception invited by the broken brushstrokes; in tandem they reveal an impressionism designed to parse multiplicity and unity.

The deliberate eclecticism of the 1894 exhibition foregrounded for viewers the perceptual position and subjectivity of the artist, the unfixed nature of the subject, an array of critical viewpoints, and even their own subject position. Such concerns—for the local, the individual, and the multiplicity of experience—reveal the adaptation of impressionism to a cultural milieu quite distinct from that of France, one in which attention to the individuated experience of nature superseded cries for institutional independence. In this discourse, “nothing but daubs” became imbued with meanings that interwove aesthetics and iconography to adapt an international style to local subjects, to signal artistic individualism, and to pursue deeper understanding of human vision and interior experience.

My thanks to editors Alexis Clark and Frances Fowle, Emily Gephart, Katherine Bourguignon, Amanda Burdan, copyeditors Chris Catanese and Laura Hensley, and to Auburn University research assistants Chloë Courtney, Anna Dobbins, and Avery Agostinelli. While critics in the period used the phrase “American Impressionism,” as have most scholars, this essay adopts instead “U.S. impressionism” in support of semantic attempts to decenter “American” as a stand-in for an entire hemisphere.

1 Catalogue of the Seventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, October 29 to December 17, 1894 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1894), 9. »

2 “View Works of Art: Seventh Annual Exhibition Shown to the Press,” Chicago Tribune, October 25, 1894, 3. »

3 “View Works of Art,” 3. On the “retreat” from impressionism at the World’s Columbian Exposition, see Janice Simon, “The Promise of 1893,” in Crosscurrents in American Impressionism at the Turn of the Century, ed. William U. Eiland, Donald Keyes, and Janice Simon (Athens: University of Georgia, 1996), 8. »

4 See especially Hamlin Garland, Lorado Taft, and Charles Browne [A Critical Triumvirate, pseud.], Impressions on Impressionism (Chicago: Central Art Association, 1894); James William Pattison, “The Impressionists at the Chicago Art Institute,” undated clipping; “American Pictures,” unknown clipping; and “Artists of America: Chicago’s Annual Exhibition of Beautiful Canvases,” Interocean (Chicago), undated clipping, all in Robert Vonnoh scrapbook, private collection, Gainesville, Fla. »

5 “Many Fine Pictures: Seventh Annual Exhibition of the American Artists,” unknown newspaper, October 28, 1894, Vonnoh scrapbook. »

6 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism; “Art in the West: Central Art Association of America’s Effort at Education,” unknown clipping, Vonnoh scrapbook, 92; William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1980), 31; and Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 137–40. »

7 On Browne, who submitted On the Border of Bass Lake, Indiana—Smoky Weather to the exhibition, see Melissa Wolfe and Joel Dryer, “Charles Francis Browne (1859–1920),” Illinois Historical Art Project, https://bit.ly/2E25iIZ. »

8 See Allen Stuart Weller and Lorado Taft, Lorado in Paris: The Letters of Lorado Taft, 1880–1885 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Allen Stuart Weller and Robert G. La France, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014). »

9 See Keith Newlin, Hamlin Garland: A Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). »

10 Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work, 120. »

11 Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art and Literature (1894; repr., Gainesville, Fla: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1952), viii. On Garland’s discussion of impressionism and attempts to apply it to his writing style, see James B. Stronks, “A Realist Experiments with Impressionism: Hamlin Garland’s ‘Chicago Studies,’” American Literature 36, no. 1 (March 1964): 38–52; and Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work, 140–43. »

12 Katherine M. Bourguignon, “Painting Impressionism in America,” in American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1900, ed. Katherine M. Bourguignon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 37–47; Gerdts, American Impressionism, 27–31; William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (New York: Abbeville, 1984); Nancy Mowll Mathews, “Monet and the Americans: Whose Impressionism?,” in Monet and American Impressionism, ed. Dulce Román (Gainesville, Fla.: Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, 2015), 27–45; Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 220–90; Julia Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging: New England Art and the Making of American Identity (Ithaca, N.Y:. Cornell University Press, 2006), 96–150; and Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters (Munich: Prestel, 1991). On the circulation of French impressionism in the United States, see Eric M. Zafran, “Monet in America,” in Claude Monet (1840–1926): A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff, ed. Odile Poncet (New York: Wildenstein, 2007), 80–152; Claire Hendren, “Impressionist Art in Private Clubs: The Case Study of the Union League Club (1886–1902),” Transatlantica 2 (2017), https://bit.ly/30AE6c3; Claire Hendren, “French Impressionism in the United States’ Greater Midwest: The 1907–8 Traveling Exhibition,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 18, no. 2 (Spring 2019), https://bit.ly/39isI8p; Michael Leja, “Monet’s Modernity in New York in 1886,” American Art 14, no. 1 (2000): 51–79; and Jennifer A. Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” in Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market, ed. Sylvie Patry (London: National Gallery, 2015), 136–51. »

13 Jennifer Martin Bienenstock, “The Formation and Early Years of the Society of American Artists, 1877–1884” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1983); and Kevin Sharp, “Independence and the Durability of American Impressionism,” in Amanda C. Burdan, ed., America’s Impressionism: Echoes of a Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 109–12. »

14 Cecilia Waern, “Some Notes on French Impressionism,” Atlantic Monthly 69, no. 414 (April 1892): 535. »

15 Anne Terhune, Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 175–81. On Alexander, see Sarah J. Moore, John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880–1915 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003); and Mary Anne Goley, John White Alexander: An American Artist in the Gilded Age (London: Philip Wilson, 2018). »

16 Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990); H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville, 1991); and Kathleen Adler, Erica E. Hirshler, and H. Barbara Weinberg, Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 (London: National Gallery, 2006). »

17 Charles De Kay, “Mr. Chase and Central Park,” Harper’s Weekly, May 2, 1891, 327. »

18 See Barbara Dayer Gallati, William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes, 1886–1890 (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1999). »

19 “Work of the Artists: Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture,” Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1894, 8. »

20 Garland, Crumbling Idols, ix, 131. »

21 Michael Rosenthal, “Introduction,” in Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–1880, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 11. »

22 See Sona Johnston, In Monet’s Light: Theodore Robinson at Giverny (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005). »

23 H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 58. Robinson wrote that Impressions on Impressionism was “witty and sensible and suggestive—the sort of thing that ought to do good.” Theodore Robinson Diaries, December 19, 1894, Frick Art Reference Library, New York. Cited in Susan G. Larkin, American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work (Greenwich, Conn.: Bruce Museum of Arts, 2005), 53, 181n10. »

24 Hamlin Garland, “Theodore Robinson,” Brush and Pencil 4, no. 6 (September 1899): 285. See also Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism, 317n37; and Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, 97–98. »

25 Theodore Robinson to Hamlin Garland, November 14, 1895, Hamlin Garland Collection, University of Southern California–Los Angeles, cited in Weinberg, Bolger and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism, 58. »

26 Garland, “Theodore Robinson,” 285; Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism, 317n35. Robinson does not seem to imply Native Americans with his use of the term “Native.” »

27 Robinson Diaries, October 29, 1893, cited in Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism and Realism, 69. »

28 On French impressionist depictions of industry, see James H. Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). »

29 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 23. »

30 Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 222; Mathews, “Monet and the Americans,” 33. On subjectivity in impressionism, see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3–13. »

31 On impressionism and independence, see Stephen F. Eisenman, “The Intransigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got Their Name,” in The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886, ed. Charles S. Moffett (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 51–59. On the myth of individualism in the United States, see Aaron Barlow, The Cult of American Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth (Westport, Conn.: ABC-CLIO, 2013); Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Allan Gardner Smith, “Stephen Crane, Impressionism and William James,” Revue française d’études américaines 17 (May 1983): 240. »

32 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 59. See also Simon, “Promise of 1893,” 15. »

33 Sharp, “Independence and the Durability of American Impressionism,” 109–12. My thanks to Alexis Clark for honing in on this subtlety. »

34 Garland, Crumbling Idols, viii. »

35 Garland, Crumbling Idols, 21. See also Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work, 127, 135–36. »

36 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 23. »

37 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 3. »

38 Pierre Sanchez, ed., Les expositions de la galerie le Barc de Boutteville (1891–1899) et du salon des cent (1894–1903): Répertoire des artistes et liste de leurs oeuvres (Dijon: L’Echelle de Jacob, 2012), 353. On Meteyard, see Nicholas Kilmer, Thomas Buford Meteyard (1865–1928): Paintings and Watercolors (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1989); Bronwyn A. E. Griffith, Thomas Buford Meteyard: Un américain chez les Nabis (Giverny: Musée d’art américain and Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2004); and David B. Dearinger, Thomas Buford Meteyard (1865–1928): Travels through Impressionism (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 2017). »

39 See Katherine M. Bourguignon, ed., Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885–1915 (Giverny: Musée d’art américain, 2007); and William H. Gerdts, Monet’s Giverny: An Impressionist Colony (New York: Abbeville, 1993). »

40 Untitled clippings, Chicago Herald, October 25 and October 26, 1894, Thomas B. Meteyard scrapbook, private collection, Bexhill, UK. »

41 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 6. »

42 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 23. »

43 “About Art and Artists,” Chicago Post, October 26, 1894, Vonnoh scrapbook, 6. »

44 By the early twentieth century, Bergson and James had read each other’s writings and exchanged letters about their overlapping ideas. See Henri Bergson, Sur le pragmatisme de William James, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011); and Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 338–51. Both Bergson and James, as well as other philosophers, noted nuanced distinctions between their perspectives, however, such as Bergson’s greater focus on time (Perry, Thought and Character, 340). See also Walter B. Pitkin, “James and Bergson: Or, Who Is Against Intellect?,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 7, no. 9 (April 28, 1910): 225–31; Horace Meyer Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914); and Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 27. »

45 Other scholars have made suggestive connections between James’s ideas and art during this period. See Emily Gephart, “Sensation and Suggestion: William James and Sadakichi Hartmann’s Symbolist Aesthetics,” William James Studies 13, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 167–89; Elizabeth Doe Stone, “Mobility and the Matter of Memory: John Singer Sargent’s Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife,” Art History 42, no. 3 (June 2019): 550–51; Smith, “Stephen Crane, Impressionism and William James”; Emily Fourmy Cutrer, “A Pragmatic Mode of Seeing: James, Howells, and the Politics of Vision,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 259–75; Henry Adams, “William James, Henry James, John La Farge, and the Foundations of Radical Empiricism,” American Art Journal 17, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 60–67; Marc Simpson, “Painting Softly: An Introduction,” in Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly, ed. Marc Simpson (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008), 4, 13–14; Cody Hartley, “True Illusion in Soft Paintings,” in Simpson, Like Breath on Glass, 75–79; Eliza Jane Reilly, “Concrete Possibilities: William James and the European Avant-Garde,” Streams of William James 2, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 22–29; and Eugene Taylor, “The Interior Landscape: George Inness and William James on Art from a Swedenborgian Point of View,” Archives of American Art Journal 37, nos. 1/2 (1997): 2–10. »

46 On constructions of vision, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). »

47 Olaf Hansen, Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect: American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). »

48 Adams, “William James, Henry James,” 65. »

49 William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; repr., New York: Dover, 1950), 1:288. See also Richard Shusterman, “The Pragmatist Aesthetics of William James,” British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 4 (October 2011): 347–61; and Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 60–63. »

50 James, Principles of Psychology, 1:224. »

51 One historian likened James’s concept of the “shimmering of consciousness” to “an Impressionist canvas—no hard contours, but fringes around every object or cluster, all of them aglow with the feeling of interest, with meaning.” Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 45. »

52 James, Principles of Psychology, 1:224. »

53 William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 10. »

54 James, Pragmatism, 56. »

55 James, Pragmatism, 60; William James, “The Knowing of Things Together” (1895), in Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 371–400. »

56 Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work, 127. »

57 Garland, Crumbling Idols, 50. »

58 Garland, Crumbling Idols, 122. »

59 Garland, Crumbling Idols, 78. »

60 “View Works of Art,” 3. »

61 “Gems of Art on View,” Chicago Post, October 24, 1894, Vonnoh scrapbook, 3. See also William H. Gerdts, “Frank Benson: His Own Man—A Study of the Artist’s Development and Its Critical Reception,” in Frank W. Benson: The Impressionist Years, ed. John Wilmerding et al. (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1988), 36–38. »

62 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 10. »

63 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 10. »

64 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 9. »

65 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 8. »

66 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 16. »

67 May Hill Brawley, Grez Days: Robert Vonnoh in France (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1987), 30–34. »

68 “American Pictures.” »

69 “Many Fine Pictures.” »

70 “Gems of Art on View.” »

71 “View Works of Art,” 3. »

72 Pattison, “Impressionists at the Chicago Art Institute.” On Pattison, see Wendy Greenhouse, “James William Pattison,” M. Christine Schwartz Collection, https://bit.ly/2WH2gR8. »

73 Garland, Taft, and Browne, Impressions on Impressionism, 6. »

74 On James’s interest in multiplicity and the fragment, see Hansen, Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect, 180. »

Previous chapter Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()