Something Borrowed: Exhibition of impressionist paintings recalls vividly America's quintessential ties to Europe

With all due respect to multiculturalism, American culture as we know it today developed largely from European models and began to diversify substantially only after the mid-20th century. Before that time, American artists tended strongly to follow European models, particularly in the field of visual art.

"American Impressions," an exhibition that opened late last month at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, revisits a chapter in American art history when this country's leading painters were absorbing and extrapolating on the lessons of French impressionism. It's a story that begins in the 1860s with impressionism's emergence as an avant-garde movement in Paris, then the center of the Western art world.

Bringing together 36 paintings that show evidence of impressionism's influence on 30 prominent American artists over more than 60 years, the exhibition is at Reynolda House Museum of American Art courtesy of the National Academy Museum in New York, which owns all but four of these paintings.

Impressionism aims to register an impression of what the eye sees at a given moment, and particularly of the impact that sunlight has on such fleeting visual perception. Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Monet and impressionism's other French originators were timely in developing a new approach to painting when photography was about to eclipse it as a means of visually recording information. Their lively, light-infused techniques and often blurred-looking imagery challenged the

more logically based, loftily concerned approach to painting favored by their academic contemporaries, thereby setting new standards as to what a painting could do or be.

At the time, American artists with serious career aspirations typically spent a year or more studying in Europe. The era's more progressively minded American painters appreciated what their French counterparts were doing with the medium, and they soon began incorporating impressionist techniques into their own work.

Obvious inflluences

In the exhibition the paintings most obviously influenced by French impressionism are those by Gifford Beal, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Childe Hassam, Walter Launt Palmer, Robert Spencer and Robert Vonnoh. Their landscape paintings, some of which incorporate figures, all date from the period between 1890 and the early 1910s, by which time other avant-garde art movements had emerged in France and elsewhere to challenge impressionism's prominence. These paintings are characterized to one degree or another by such impressionist hallmarks as prominent brushwork and pale colors that evoke bright sunlight.

One of Hassam's two works in the exhibition, Giant Magnolias (1904), is from Reynolda House's permanent collection, as is William Merritt Chase's In the Studio (circa 1884). The exhibition's other two paintings that didn't come from the National Academy Museum are William Glackens' Woman and Dog in Garden (1915) and John Singer Sargent's portrait of Marchesa Laura Spinola Nunez del Castillo (1903), both owned by Barbara Babcock Millhouse, Reynolda House's founding president and a member of its board of directors. Millhouse has loaned the two paintings to Reynolda House on a long-term basis.

The exhibition also includes Sargent's portrait of French impressionist Claude Monet, strategically hung alongside James Carroll Beckwith's 1889 portrait of William Merritt Chase. The juxtaposition highlights the resemblance of the two artists, both posed in black jackets that match their close-cropped hair and full beards.

Mostly American

The Sargent portraits notwithstanding, the works in this show primarily treat American subject matter, although it's not always readily identifiable as such, and some of these paintings bear more of impressionism's visual hallmarks than do others. For example, John Lafarge's intimately scaled still-life painting of a Magnolia Blossom in a glass bowl of water -- the show's earliest work, from about 1860 -- is more illusionistic than impressionistic.

And one of its later paintings, John Folinsbee's The Canal at Trenton (1924), looks like a classic Ashcan-school painting, with its line of figures in the middle distance trudging through the snow alongside the canal, apparently walking toward the imposing factory and tenement buildings arrayed across the background. It would have looked at home with the exhibition of leading Ashcan-school painter John Sloan's work, which preceded "American Impressionism" at Reynolda House.

Among the current show's most striking works on their own terms are Birge Harrison's The Hidden Moon (1907), a hauntingly evocative view of moonlight gleaming from behind nocturnal storm clouds; and Karl Anderson's lavender-tinged Wisteria (1915), depicting a woman in a garden alongside silhouetted clusters of wisteria blossoms. Henry O. Tanner's Miraculous Haul of Fishes (circa 1913) is distinguished by its loosely expressionistic brushwork and stark chromatic contrasts; and George Bellows' Three Rollers (1911) by the strong black outlines highlighting the steep gray bluffs looming in this dramatic coastal landscape.

With its sparely brushed, dark trees set off against a snowy hillside, Abbott Thayer's Winter Landscape (1902) stands out as the exhibition's most modern-looking painting, although it's hardly the show's most recent one.

By the time the latest works on view were painted, in the 1920s, impressionism had been supplanted in its avant-garde status by other far more daring kinds of artistic expression. It had also ceased to be of interest to leading collectors in this country and Europe, but that began to change by the 1960s, which saw the emergence of a new audience and a new market for impressionist paintings.

■ "American Impressions" is on view through June 28 at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, 2250 Reynolda Road. For more information, call 758-5150.