American Impressionism

About

From the late 1880s American painters began spending summers in Giverny, where Claude Monet lived. Theodore Robinson, among the first, carried the lessons of broken colour and open-air light home. Within a decade the style led American painting, and in 1897–98 Childe Hassam, John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Willard Metcalf, Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson and others broke from an established artists' society to exhibit as the Ten American Painters.

Compared with French work, American Impressionism usually keeps a sturdier sense of drawing and solid form. Summer art colonies helped it spread: William Merritt Chase taught outdoor classes at Shinnecock on Long Island, painters gathered at Old Lyme in Connecticut and New Hope in Pennsylvania, and in Boston Tarbell and Benson painted sunlit figures and quiet interiors. Hassam's flag-hung Fifth Avenue paintings of 1916–19 show the style lasting well into the new century.