American impressionism

de Richard R. Brettell, Frances Fowle, Katherine M. Bourguignon

Overview: This lively, beautifully illustrated book focuses on a group of American artists who applied Impressionist ideas and techniques to American subjects, and in so doing, they attracted and cultivated an enthusiastic American audience. These artists, including Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Theodore Robinson, William Merritt Chase, and Childe Hassam, invented a new and highly diverse formulation of the Impressionist movement. Essays by experts in the field of Impressionism discuss the impact of Impressionism on the countryside and city paintings of Robinson and Hassam; and consider significant pictures by Cassatt, Sargent, and Whistler that demonstrate their role in the exploration of brilliant color harmonies and compositions developed from contact with French artists such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. The book features more than 60 paintings, some well known, others less familiar, produced in Europe and America. By representing American imagery, from the Atlantic coastline to New York's public gardens, through the most current ideas about art-making, the artists showcased here created a unique expression of an evolving national identity.