In the late 19th century, American artists by the
hundreds – including such luminaries as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer
Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer – were drawn
irresistibly to Paris, the world’s new art capital, to learn to paint and to
establish their reputations. By studying with leading masters and showing their
work in Paris, these artists aimed to attract
patronage from American collectors who had begun to buy contemporary French art
in earnest soon after the end of the Civil War. Paris
inspired decisive changes in American painters’ styles and subjects, and
stimulated the creation of more sophisticated art schools and higher
professional standards back in the United States.
Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on
October 24, the landmark exhibition Americans in Paris, 1860-1900
features some 100 oil paintings by 37 Americans whose accomplishments proclaim
the truth of Henry James’s 1887 observation: “It sounds like a paradox,
but it is a very simple truth, that when to-day we look for ‘American art’ we
find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great
deal of Paris in it.” Representing the breadth
of artistic activity in Paris, the exhibition includes painters who were
aligned with vanguard tendencies – particularly Impressionism – as well as
those who espoused the academic principles that many American patrons
preferred.
The exhibition is made possible by Bank of America.
and Frank A. Cosgrove Jr. Fund.
Gallery, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in association with The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
which is the exhibition’s final stop in an international three-city tour, will
feature several important canvases – on view only in this location – that are
drawn from the Museum’s own extensive holdings. Of particular interest are
Whistler’s masterly Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Black: Portrait of
Théodore Duret, an image of a
leading collector, art critic, and consummate “man about Paris,” which
was painted in 1883 and exhibited at the 1885 Paris Salon, and Eakins’s Writing
Master, a sensitive portrayal of his father, painted in 1882 and shown in
the 1890 Paris Salon. The installation
will be further enhanced with fine examples of American sculpture by artists –
including Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick William MacMonnies – who also
studied and showed their work in Paris.
“Paris became the world’s most
beautiful metropolis in the late 19th century, and one of its most dynamic,”
noted Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum. “Filled with
the best of the old and the new – from the Louvre’s magnificent collections to
Haussmann’s grand boulevards – the city attracted throngs of American art students and artists.
Along with their international counterparts, they found themselves plunged into
a vibrant cultural milieu, a place that a Boston painter described as ‘one vast
studio.’ Although the lure of Paris for late-19th-century American artists is
now widely recognized, Americans in Paris,
1860-1900 breaks new ground as the first-ever treatment of this subject in
a major exhibition in leading museums.”
Exhibition Overview
Picturing Paris
Aware
that the time they had in Paris was precious, most Americans devoted themselves
to their studies. Yet many responded to the city’s vitality and flux and
recorded its handsome parks and boulevards and its glittering
theatres and cafés. The installation at the Metropolitan opens with some of
these scenes. Three pictures portray the elegant Luxembourg Gardens on the Left
Bank. An alluring 1879 canvas by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) captures a
well-dressed couple on a romantic twilight stroll (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
A panel painting of 1889 by Charles Courtney Curran (1861-1942) focuses on a
solitary young woman quietly feeding birds that gather at her feet, while
livelier activities take place in the distance (Terra Foundation for American
Art). And women playing with a baby while seated on a bench are the subject of the
1892-94 panel painting by Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924), a study of texture,
pattern, and color (Terra Foundation for American Art).
of Fine Arts, Boston) by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). A fashionable woman peers through opera
glasses – at the stage or, perhaps, at the other theatergoers – while a man in
a nearby box gazes through his opera glasses at her. Like the views of Parisian parks, this image
conveys the appeal of the city’s social spaces, which invited people to see and
to be seen.
Through more than a dozen portraits, the exhibition
introduces some of the American art students and their prominent mentors who
participated in the Parisian art community. The unconventional 1875
self-portrait of Thomas Hovenden (1840-
cramped Paris studio, where he slouches, dissolute and disheveled, with a
violin in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth, as he stares at a canvas on an
easel (Yale University Art Gallery). In contrast, the bold 1885 self-portrait
of Ellen Day Hale (1855-1940) communicates forthrightness, strength of
character, and an independent spirit – in short, the personality traits of a
modern young professional woman (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Beckwith (1852-1917) signals the migration of French styles to America by
placing his dapper subject – a former colleague in Paris – against a background
of Impressionist landscapes in Beckwith’s New York studio (The Century
Association). The influence of James McNeill Whistler, who was then living in
Paris, is evident in the muted tones, thin paint application, and monogrammed
signature in the circa 1896 portrait by Hermann Dudley Murphy (1867-1945) of
his fellow student Henry Ossawa Tanner, who would become the era’s foremost
African-American painter (The Art Institute of Chicago).
include two impressive portraits of leading French artists. John Singer
Sargent’s likeness of Carolus-Duran, painted shortly after the young American
had left his renowned teacher’s atelier, captures both the master’s
self-assurance and his famously elegant apparel (Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute). It was highly praised
when it appeared in the 1879 Paris Salon. The dignified 1898 portrait by Anna
Elizabeth Klumpke (1856-1942) of the esteemed animal painter Rosa Bonheur
depicts the elderly artist in the year before her death, seated at the easel,
paintbrush in hand, her white hair transformed into a halo by the play of light
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
At Home in Paris
About one-third of the Americans who studied art in
Paris in the late 19th century were women, of whom one of the most distinctive
and successful was Mary Cassatt. One of the principal American expatriates in
Paris and the only American to show with the Impressionists, Cassatt was
devoted to recording the world of women like herself. Living in the company of
her parents and sister, who moved to Paris in 1877 to be with her, she often
portrayed them and their visiting relatives.
1878, shows Cassatt’s mother, who was fluent in French and interested in
current affairs, intently reading the French daily newspaper (private
collection). The Tea,
painted about 1880, depicts a young woman in the Cassatt family’s
well-appointed Paris apartment playing hostess to a visitor in the daily
afternoon ritual (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Paris as Proving Ground
Key to the professional ambitions of most
late-19th-century American painters, even those who never studied in Paris, was
recognition by the Parisian art world. The largest and most prestigious
showcases were the official Salons, immense juried exhibitions administered
by the French government until 1881 and by the Société des Artistes-Français
thereafter. In 1863, the
infamous Salon des Refusés presented
works that had been rejected by the Salon jury. In 1890, a second, less
conservative Salon, held under the auspices of the
Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, was added to the annual calendar. Huge
Expositions Universelles, scheduled toward the end of every decade, offered
further opportunities to make one’s mark, as did displays in commercial art
galleries.
Whistler (1834-1903) for boldness
in White, No. 1: The White Girl (National Gallery of Art, Washington), painted in
1862. The model – who was also Whistler’s mistress – stands impassively before
a white drapery in a white dress, her long auburn hair falling loosely, as she
holds a white flower in her hand. Rejected by London’s Royal Academy in 1862,
and then by the 1863 Paris Salon, the enigmatic painting was shown at the Salon
des Refusés – where it attracted notoriety for its lack of
any decipherable narrative – and in the American section of the 1867 Exposition
Universelle.
John Singer Sargent hoped to garner success by
painting and showing an impressive portrait of a dazzling subject – the
celebrated Louisiana-born beauty Virginie Avegno, who had entered Parisian
society by marrying Pierre Gautreau, a wealthy banker. The picture, with which
Sargent struggled in 1883-84, conveys the subject’s haughty demeanor as she
poses in a daring black dress, her head in profile, her shoulders tinted with lavender
powder, her ear rouged. Sargent sent Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau)
to the 1884 Salon, where, instead of the hoped-for acclaim, it attracted so
much negative criticism that it effectively ended Sargent’s career in Paris. He
moved to London in 1886, and made it his headquarters for the rest of his life.
The painting – which he considered to be his best work – remained in his
possession until 1916, when he sold it to the
Metropolitan Museum.
Summers in the Country
Although they had been drawn to Paris by its
schools, museums, and exhibitions, artists almost always fled the city in
summer, seeking respite from professional pressures and relief from the heat.
Traveling by railroad, then by horse-drawn carriage, and finally, sometimes, on
foot, they sought out rural retreats – usually not too distant from the capital. Such places offered
picturesque subjects and vestiges of earlier, simpler times, as well as cheap
accommodations, modest living costs, and opportunities for camaraderie. While
some painters spent time in several of the art colonies that flourished during
the period – Barbizon, Pont-Aven, and Grez-sur-Loing, for example – others
visited only one, and a few even purchased homes in hospitable locales, built
studios, and remained for years.
became acquainted in 1876 and they remained lifelong friends. In 1885, the year
after the failure of Madame X in the Salon, Sargent visited the Norman
village of Giverny, where Monet had been living for two years. There the
American created his Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood (Tate,
London), which shows the French master immersed in nature, working en plein
air. An important art colony,
populated mainly by Americans, would begin to develop in Giverny by 1887.
few Americans in Giverny’s community of artists with whom Monet became
friendly. Robinson painted his unique canvas, The Wedding March (Terra
Foundation for American Art), in 1892 to commemorate the marriage in Giverny of
American painter Theodore Earl Butler to Monet’s stepdaughter, a union that
Monet opposed.
site in 1888 in his canvas
at the home of friends in Villiers-le-Bel, just north of Paris. Hassam’s
wife can be seen through the open window, partially obscured by blossoms, as
she tends to her sewing.
When American artists returned home, they sought
out rural retreats that resembled those they had frequented in Europe.
These places, which were often in New England, provided opportunities for
outdoor painting, connection with old-fashioned values, and a welcome change
from modern urban life. The vivid 1888
canvas Chrysanthemums (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) by Dennis Miller
Bunker (1861-1890) – among the first Impressionist canvases made in the United
States – shows the riotous floral display in the greenhouse at Green Hill, the
Massachusetts summer home of the art patrons John L. and Isabella Stewart
Gardner.
A Study in June Sunlight
(Milwaukee Art Museum), painted in 1890 by Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-1938), was
the artist’s first important work in the Impressionist style. Tarbell’s wife
(holding their daughter) and her sisters sit in a sun-dappled New England
garden, probably in Dorchester, a historic village that had been annexed
recently to Boston.
Catalogue
and Related Programs
The exhibition is accompanied by a
fully illustrated catalogue. It was written by the exhibition’s curators
Kathleen Adler (Director of Education, National Gallery, London), Erica E.
Hirshler (Croll Senior Curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston), and H. Barbara Weinberg (Alice Pratt Brown Curator of
American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),
Curry, Rodolphe Rapetti, and Christopher Riopelle, and with the assistance of
Megan Holloway Fort and Kathleen Mrachek. The book is published by the National
Gallery Company and is available in the Museum’s book shops ($65 hardcover and
$40 paperback).
Metropolitan Museum by H. Barbara Weinberg, with assistance from Elizabeth
Athens, Research Assistant. Exhibition design is by
Daniel Kershaw, Senior Exhibition
Designer; graphics are by Emil Micha, Senior Graphic Design Manager; and
lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Senior Lighting Designers,
all of the Museum’s Design Department.
members. On Tuesdays through Sundays for the full duration of the exhibition, Americans
in Paris, 1860-1900 will be open to Metropolitan Museum members
beginning at 9 a.m. This will offer the Museum’s members – at all levels of
membership – the special opportunity to view the exhibition before the doors
open to the public at 9:30 a.m.
in conjunction with the exhibition, including gallery talks, family programs,
and a screening of the film An American in Paris. A Sunday at the Met program of lectures and discussion
by authorities on American Impressionism is scheduled for December 3. Seven
speakers – including Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker and distinguished professors and curators
– will participate in a symposium to be held on November 30. These programs are free with Museum
admission.
Foundation.
programs for the exhibition will be available – one for general visitors and
another for families with children. The fee for rentals will be $5 for members
of the Museum, $6 for non-members, and $4 for children under 12.
will be available at www.metmuseum.org/podcast.
Visit the Met’s site. Or, Learn about the Met Podcast series.
http://www.metmuseum.org/podcast/index.asp
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