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.
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.
Additional support is provided by the Marguerite and Frank A. Cosgrove
Jr. Fund.
organized by the National Gallery, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
the Humanities.
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.
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).
Français is the focus of the intriguing 1878 canvas In the Loge (Museum
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.
Artists
in Paris
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-
1895) shows him every inch the bohemian in his 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).
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).
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.
in 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.
boldness
and controversy was launched by his captivating Symphony 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
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.
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.
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.
canvas
Geraniums (The Hyde Collection). The setting is
the garden 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.
Back
in the United States
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.
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),
with contributions from David Park 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).
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.
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.
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.
Guide 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.
Visit the Met’s site. Or, Learn about the Met Podcast series.
http://www.metmuseum.org/podcast/index.asp
Listen to the episode.
http://www.metmuseum.org/audio/exhibitions/mmaExhibPodcast.01082007.mp3