American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work 3186700218, 097663810X, 0711225850

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PHILLIPS • ACADEMY

American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work

Impressionism

Susan G. Larkin

Catalogue entries by Susan G. Larkin and Arlene Katz Nichols

Bruce Museum of Arts and Science

This catalogue is published in conjunction with tin < xhibition American Impressionism: Thi /5 (.111 on canvas, 7” 5/8 x 122 4/8 in. I he Metropolitan Museum of Art, (jift ot (icorgc A. Hearn, 1894 (94.2'")

tig. 9. Wmslow Homer (American, 1836-1910) The Veteran in a New Held, 186.5 Oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 38 1/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de (iroot, 196" (6"’. 187.1311

contemporary critic complained, the farmer would have used a modern cradled scythe, one with a comblike wooden frame attached.

By painting

out the cradle (still faintly visible as a pentimento), Homer accentuated the sharp blade and evoked Death, the Grim Reaper, which had claimed so many lives in the Civil War. Homer’s punning title attaches redemptive meaning to work. Disbanded from the killing fields of war, the veteran enters a new field—literally, the newly cultivated acreage the veteran is harvesting but more broadly a new field of endeavor with all the optimism that term implies. Homer made different uses of the labor theme at different stages of his career. After documenting the Civil War both in powerful paintings and in illustrations for Harper's Weekly, he turned in the 1870s to the subject of rural childhood. Feeding Time (fig. 10) is one of a group of watercolors he painted during a stay at Houghton Farm, a patron’s experimental farm near West Point, New York. There, Homer portrayed children dreamily doing the chores, seeming to play at work like shepherds and milkmaids in Chelsea porcelain. Such bucolic images of a country childhood held broad appeal when America’s population wras shifting from farms to the city.

Homer also mitigated the realities of agricultural labor in his paintings of African American fieldworkers. The women in The Cotton Pickers (fig. 11) are as exotic as their counterparts in Orientalist paintings. The slippery meanings of The Cotton Pickers can be gauged by the reaction of those who saw it when it was exhibited briefly in New York just after Homer completed it. To fellow artist F. Hopkinson Smith, “the whole story of Southern slavery was written in every line of (the foreground figure’s] patient, uncomplaining face.”

A critic who also saw the painting at the

Century Club in March 1876 sensed different emotions, describing one of the women as “unhappy and disheartened,” the other as “defiant and full

f ig. 10. Winslow Homer (American, 1836-1910) heeding Time, 1878 Watercolor and gouache over pencil sketch, 8 3/4x11 1/4 in. Sterling and Franeine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts 11955.1493)

Fig. 11. Winslow Homer (American, 1836-1910) The Cotton Pickers, I 876 Oil on canvas, 24 x 38 1/8 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Acquisition made possible by museum trustees Robert O. Anderson, R. Stanton Avery, B.

Gerald Canton, F’dward W. Carter, Justin Dart, Charles E. Ducommun, Camilla Chandler Frost, Julian Ganzjr., Dr. Armand Hammer, Harry Lenart, Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, Mrs. Joan Palevsky, Richard Sherwood, Maynard J. Toll, and Hal B. Wallis IM.77.68)

of hatred." Understanding the figures to he slaves, that writer continued, “The story is one not only worth telling, but one that can be told better by the artist than by the historian.”:i The story was sufficiently prettified, however, that “a wealthy Hnglish cotton spinner” purchased it and took it across the Atlantic.

Hngland, whose textile mills depended on American

cotton exports, had supported the South in the Civil War. A British mill owner would not readily have displayed in his home a realistic documentation of the backbreaking work of cotton picking, but Homer’s somewhat sweetened rendering passed muster. Conforming to the conventions of his time, Homer did not show women and children working hard, fie brought a sterner treatment to the subject of New England fishermen. The hog Warning (fig. 12) shows a lone fisherman rowing through rough seas, headed toward a schooner that carried dories like his to the deep waters of the Grand Banks.Poised at the crest of a wave, the fisherman realizes that he may not reach safety before the fog looming on the horizon descends. Here, nature is not the nurturing mother suggested in other nineteenth-century paintings but a threat to the heroic fisherman.

Thomas Eakins chose a less perilous type of fishing as the subject of three canvases including Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (fig. 13). Unlike Homer’s ocean-going fishermen, who ventured far from shore to catch halibut on long troll lines, those in Eakins’s painting worked in teams to seine the shad as they swam upriver in spring to spawn where they had hatched. Using techniques modified only slightly since the Eenape Indians fished along the Delaware, the shad fishermen operated in relatively shallow water close to shore. Consequently, Eakins’s canvas lacks any threat of danger and, compared with Homer’s contemporaneous renderings of fishermen, seems overly detailed—partly as a result of the artist's having composed it from two photographs.J4 “The artist has not attempted to deal dramatically” with the theme, a critic wrote of the

16

tig- 12. Winslow Homer (American, 11 10) IlX4 Oil on canvas, 40 3/4 \ 55 1/2 in. I he National Gallery, London

found in Constable’s paintings of English rural life a model for depicting workers in the landscape. The Hay Wain (fig. 30) represents a setting that Constable knew well and sketched incessantly. Under towering clouds, a farm wagon fords the River Stour, a fisherman secures his rowboat in the reeds, and haymakers toil in a sunny meadow. Painted on a six-foot-wide canvas—a scale until then reserved for history paintings—Constable's scrupulously observed rendition of the English countryside contrasted sharply with the idealized Italianate landscapes populated with nymphs and satyrs that hung near it in the Paris Salon of 1824. Artists there acclaimed The Hay Wain, which won a gold medal and marked the beginning of a shift in French painting. Robinson eloquently described Constable’s impact: “From that time forth the idea has lived and thrived, though not without strong opposition, that common things and common people are worth painting. The democratic idea in art that despises nothing, that denies nothing, that seeks for beauty and character everywhere, even among the humblest surroundings, has triumphed.” Constable’s choice of “common things and common people” as subject matter inspired the artists who in the mid-nineteenth century gathered in and around Barbizon, a village tucked between the Forest of Fontainebleau and the Plain of Chailly. About thirty-five miles southeast of Paris, Barbizon was close enough to the city to enable the artists to maintain their professional ties while depicting the modest landscape of small farms, low hills, and managed forests in rough brushwork that corresponded with the rustic subject matter. Several artists, notably Theodore Rousseau, devoted themselves to the modest working landscape. Jean-Franqois Millet,

Fig. 30. |ohn Constable (t'nglish, 1 The Hay Wain, 1821 Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 73 in. The National Gallery, London

r6-183^i

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who settled in Barbizon in 1849, was the group’s foremost figurative painter—and one of the most influential artists of the nineteenth century. The son of a prosperous Norman farmer, Millet patterned his life on that of his subjects, prompting contemporaries to label him “the peasant painter.” He spent mornings tending the vegetable garden near the cottage where he lived with his wife and nine children and afternoons depicting his neighbors: “sawyers at work at gigantic trees, wood-gatherers, charcoal-burners, quarrymen worn out with their frightful toil, poachers on the scent, stone-breakers, road-laborers, men plowing, harrowing, and wood-cutting.”"

Millet's portrayals of the real work of real people evoked conflicted responses in both France and America, responses that shifted with the economic and political situation in each country. When The Gleaners (fig. 31) debuted at the Paris Salon of 1857, hostile French critics recoiled from the leftist social critique they detected in this portrayal of impoverished women scavenging for spilled grains.i: But the first American commentary on The Gleaners, which appeared in the art journal C.rayon that same year, interpreted it as an image of “repose and sunny effect . . . such as one feels on a sultry day in August.”1' A few years later, as the C ivil War raged, a dramatically different interpretation was offered by a New York journalist who compared the gleaners to “‘field hands’ on Southern plantations; their skulls are as animal, but they have none of the inoffensiveness of expression of the poor slave.” l ike his French contemporaries, that writer worried that the peasants “may awaken any

40

Fiji. 'I. (can-Francois Millet

(French, 1814-1875) Thr (ih-jHrrs, 18 5" Oil on canvas, 33 x 4.1 3/4 in. Muscc d’Orsav, Paris

moment to assert their power and avenge their wrongs.”14 By the end of the century, however, the three hunched paupers who had aroused fears of social unrest were venerated as emblems of the essential, preindustrial France; The Gleaners was proudly accepted by the Musee du Louvre in 1890. The Angelas (fig. 32) carried even greater emotional freight. The subject—a couple pausing in the fields to pray—was assigned by the Boston collector Thomas Appleton, who commissioned the painting in 1857 but failed to claim it. Ironically, the painting’s religious theme, deeply rooted in the folkways of rural France, was dictated by a Yankee

Protestant to a French Catholic who no longer practiced his faith. Nonetheless, Millet’s mythologizing agent, collector, and biographer Alfred Sensier spun a tale of the artist’s piety that shaped public reception of the painting." World-famous by the time it came up at auction in 1889, The Angelas provoked a bidding war between French and American interests. Concerned that many of Millet’s finest works had already been sold to American (especially Bostonian) collectors, the French were determined to prevent this iconic canvas from falling into the hands of the moneyed Yankee upstarts. A consortium of patrons, represented by the minister of fine arts Antonin Proust, pooled funds to purchase the painting for the Louvre. After heated competition, Proust’s group won The Angelas for 553,000 francs, a record price for a modern painting.16 Because of lack

l in. 32. Jean-Fran«,'ois Millet (French, 1814-1875) The Angelas, 1857-59 Oil on canvas, 21 7/8 x 26 in. Musee d’Orsay, Paris

of timely support by the French government, however, the consortium was forced to relinquish the painting to the underbidder. New York's commercial American Art Association, which sent The Angelas on a seven-city tour of the United States and Canada in anticipation of finding a buyer. Over the next several months, articles in American newspapers trumpeted the acquisition of The Angelas as evidence of America’s cultural parity with F’urope. At the same time, however, some critics objected to images of work and workers as unsuitable to high art and unappealing to an American audience. “We have no peasants here,” wrote the influential critic Clarence Cook, “and our ‘working-people,’ as they are fond of calling themselves, offer no peg on which to hang poetry ... or picturesqueness of any kind.” For “all these . . . diggings and plantings, sowings and reapings and gleanings,” Cook sniffed, “our people . . . care nothing whatever.”1 Cook’s was the minority opinion, however. Exhibited in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, The Angelas evoked emotional responses from viewers, extensive press coverage, and sermons in both Catholic and Protestant churches. Laura Meixner observes that, viewed “against a background of labor violence and terror, . . . Millet’s peasants offered a nervous middle class respite from nightmare visions of godless Europeans plotting class warfare on American shores.” The pious peasant contrasted with “the urban bomb thrower,” and religion was seen as a sustaining force in the lives of laborers.18 In the end, however. The

I ig. O. Jcan-Fran^'ois Millet (French. 1814-1 S^S) Man with a Hue, 1860-fe2 Oil on warnas, .11 1/2 x l1/ in. I"he I Paul t>err\ Museum, I os Angeles (85.PA.114)

Angelus failed to find an American buyer, partly because its relatively modest dimensions did not represent good value to those who expected an enormous, Salon-size canvas for the high asking price. A wealthy French merchant arranged to buy the painting for 750,000 francs. It returned to France in January 1891, entering the Louvre as a bequest in 1909.1 By then, reproductions of The Angelus hung in thousands of American homes, where it was venerated as an icon of religious devotion, family cohesiveness, and the dignity of labor. Changing social conditions could reconcile conflicting responses to The Gleaners and The Angelus. However, a third Millet painting that also became famous in the United States, Man with a Hoe (fig. 33), resisted sentimental interpretation. Whereas the social critique in The Gleaners was subtly embedded in the composition, Man with a Hoe inescapably confronted viewers with the dehumanizing effects of a lifetime of drudgery. The painting gained notoriety in the United States when the San Francisco banker William H. Crocker acquired it in 1891. Its fame spread when, in 1899, Edwin Markham’s poem “The Man with the Hoe” was published, often with editorial comments, in newspapers across the country. Millet’s starkest portrayal of a laborer, the painting was adopted by Socialists and reformers as an emblem of the exploitation of workers, industrial as well as agricultural. Moving to disassociate Americans from the image, some writers and preachers pointed out, with no conscious irony, that in this country “drudgery is done by men from other lands, largely by those who cannot even speak English.”20 For the American artists who came of age in the 1870s, Millet was a more complex artist than The Gleaners, The Angelus, and Man with a Hoe suggest. Familiar with a wider range of imagery than the handful of paintings on which his reputation rests today, progressive American painters admired Millet for his boldness of execution and his redemption of modest, familiar subject matter. Many emulated the pattern established by the Boston artist William Morris Hunt, who first visited Millet in Barbizon in the winter of 1852-53 and worked closely with him there until 1855. When Hunt returned to the United States, he fueled appreciation for the work of Barbizon painters among Boston collectors and painters. Largely as a consequence of his proselytizing, some of the future American Impressionists first saw Millet’s paintings in the United States. Willard Metcalf’s student sketchbook includes a rendering he made in 1877 of Millet’s Laundresses, then owned by the Boston collector Quincy Adams Shaw.21 Following Hunt’s lead, many young American artists studying abroad took the train from Paris to paint in the landscape Millet had made famous. J. Alden Weir made the pilgrimage in April 1874, a few months after he arrived in France. “This place is just at the edge of the large forest of Fontainebleau, a very picturesque village and one much visited

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by artists,” he wrote to his mother. “The great Millet lives there. . . . [The artists| dress much like the peasants, wearing the sabots or large wooden shoes, and blue blouse.”

After Millet’s death the Following January, Weir

attended an exhibition of his drawings. “He was a peasant and rose to be one of the greatest of them all,” the student eulogized his hero in a letter home. “I I is subjects were always rural life—the peasants at work or repose.”

Millet’s death did not stem the flow of artists flocking to

Barbi/on to trace Ins footsteps. Weir returned in April 1877. The associations of the landscape captivated the romantic young man, w'ho described a scene that might have furnished the subject for a Barbizon painting. “It is scarcely more than a stone’s throw from [the inn| to the forest and on the very edge, seen from my window, is a pretty little thatched roof cottage, where an artist and his wife live,” Weir wrote to his parents. “They were out in the garden digging when 1 opened my window. She was singing a pretty air while they raked the scrubble together.”24 Weir eventually acquired a drawing by Millet, whom he called “the greatest painter of the century.”25 Robinson visited Barbizon every year between 1884 and 1887. I here, like Millet, he found his motifs in the hamlet and on the broad, fertile plain rather than in the mossy recesses of the forest. In 1894 Robinson admired a little-known oil by Millet temporarily on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 44). He sketched the painting in his diary and described it in detail: “ Three women washing clothes by a brook some clothes hanging up at left—at rt. a basket—steps behind. In the distance a row of geese coming down the bank—and a peasant going over the hill.” 1 le enunciated the lesson the painting held for him: the “ignoring of petty details” in favor of capturing the essentials. “In this Millet, things are recognisable,” Robinson wrote, “but there is no insistence on the wattles of the baskets, or the variety of reflections in the water, or stones or inequalities in the slope back of the women.” Perhaps referring to the

I in. >4 lean I ransois Millet i trench, IS14-1 S~S) 1 hr W.hl’rru■ntut'H, c. IS50-52 Oil on canvas, IS 1/4 x 21 "7N in. Private l ollection

Fig. 3.5. (laude Monet (French, 1840-1V26) WoodgJtherers Jt the Edge of the Forest, c. 1863 Oil on panel, 23 1/2 x 35 1/2 in. Museum of l ine Arts, Boston, Henrv H. and Zoc Oliver Sherman Fund (1 S#^4.32 5 s

microscopic precision of the British Pre-Raphaelites and their American followers, Robinson wrote, “we will never compete with the old men if we run after detail and paint blades of grass, etc.”’' The Washerwomen exemplifies Millet’s realistic renderings of country folk absorbed in their ordinary tasks. It was paintings like this, neither polemical nor sentimental, that made him a hero to younger artists, both European and American. Many of the French Impressionists also painted in the Forest of Fontainebleau at the start of their careers. In the early 1860s the young Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederic Bazille, and Alfred Sisley worked in Chailly, a village on the edge of the forest about a mile and a half from Barbizon. There, they chose motifs associated with the Barbizon artists, painting woodland interiors, humble farmyards, and cattle drinking from streams. Monet’s Woodgatherers at the Edge of the Forest (fig. 35) shows paupers carrying bundles of firewood on their backs, a theme that Millet had treated in numerous paintings and drawings. The French Impressionists largely abandoned the labor theme when they developed their own new style, focusing instead, with rare exceptions, on contemporary leisure. One such exception is Monet’s Unloading Coal (fig. 36), in which stevedores unloading a coal barge create a pattern like notes on a musical staff. The bold composition and narrow range of earth tones perfectly express the gritty subject matter, but never again would

f ig. .36. Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) Unloading (.al, 18~5 Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 26 in. Muse* d’Orsay, Paris

Monet so openly embrace the subject of labor. In Giverny he affected the peasants’ wooden shoes and blue shirt, as Millet had done in Barbizon, but whereas Millet had followed the workers into the fields to sketch them sowing and harvesting, Monet depicted the fields around Giverny when they were choked with poppies, a weedy nuisance to farmers (fig. 37). Monet took a different approach when he painted grainstacks in 1890-91 (see, for example, fig. 38). With that series, Paul Tucker argues, Monet “was consciously reacquainting himself not only with Giverny’s sheer beauty but also with its fundamental agrarian character.”27 Monumentalizing the stacks of harvested grain that epitomized the fecundity of France’s soil and the skill of her farmers, Monet appealed to the public’s apparently insatiable taste for images of the French countryside. Reviewing the first exhibition of the grainstack paintings, the critic Roger Marx judged that they “symbolize and sum up the labor, the sowing, and the harvesting, all of the harsh fight with the elements to fertilize the land, all the arduous and superb work of the earth.”2* Apart from the grainstack paintings, Monet rarely chose themes related to labor. The Impressionist identified with that subject is Camille Pissarro. The only artist who participated in all eight Impressionist exhibitions, Pissarro drafted plans for the group, based on the charter of a bakers’ union. The concept of an artists' cooperative suited Pissarro’s Socialist convictions, as did his devotion to the theme of peasant life. In paintings like Recoltc des pomtnes, I’ontoise (fig. 39), he updated Millet’s renderings of countryfolk with the brighter colors, broken brushstrokes, and brilliant light of Impressionism. In an unusual combination of luxury format with labor content, he decorated several silk fan mounts with harvest scenes. The

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FidC laude Monet (French, 1840-1926) Pop fry held {Gwerny/, 1890-9| Oil on canvas, 24 \ 36 S/8 in. I In- \rt Institute ot C hicago, Mr. and Mrs. W W Kimball C ollection I ^22.446 Si

Fig. 38. Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun), 1891 Oil on canvas, 2S 3/4 x 36 1/4 in. 1 he Metropolitan Museum of Art, H. O. Havcmever Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havcmever, 1929 (29.100.109)

Fig. 39. Camille Pissarro (French, 1830-1903) Recolte des pommes, Pontoise (Potato Gatherers), c. 1880 Oil on canvas, 18 1/8x21 3/4 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection (1975.1.197)

Cabbage Gatherers (fig. 40) depicts women harvesting the humblest of vegetables. Its celebration of rural life is indebted not only to Millet, whom Pissarro considered “a bit too Biblical,” but to Constable, whose paintings Pissarro admired during visits to museums in London while he and Monet were there during the Franco-Prussian War. Pissarro’s “happy temperament” commended him to Robinson, who met him at Monet’s home. There, too, the American admired a small Pissarro oil depicting “some peasant women sticking peabrush,” which Monet owned.29 When Thomas Sergeant Perry asked Robinson's advice on “a good man to study landscape with,” Robinson recommended Pissarro.,p Robinson’s own subject matter, and that of his Giverny associate Metcalf, corresponds more closely to Pissarro’s than to Monet’s. Other French Impressionists occasionally deviated from their usual leisure themes. Renoir painted buxom washerwomen; Gustave Caillebotte depicted the floorscrapers in his Paris apartment; Berthe Morisot portrayed laundresses hanging out the wash. Sisley’s Sawing Wood (fig. 41) seems as casual and matter-of-fact as a snapshot of a town where trees have been felled to widen the street. Perhaps it was the geometry of the sawyers’ rig that captured Sisley’s eye; perhaps it was the same fascination with skilled labor that compelled the passerby in the painting to pause, hand on hip, and watch the operation. Edgar Degas is noted for paintings of ballerinas, cafe singers, and jockeys—workers, to be sure, but people who worked to provide entertainment for the middle and upper classes. I hose images are

Fig. 40. Camille Pissarro (French, 18.50-1903) Fan Mount: The Cabbage Gatherers, c.1878-79 Gouache on silk, 6 1/2 x 20 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1 eonora Brenauer Bequest, in memory of her father, Joseph B. Brenauer, 1944 (1994.105)

Fig. 41. Alfred Sisley (French, 1839-1899) Sawing Wood, 1876 Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 25 5/8 in. Mu see du Petit Palais, Paris

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counterbalanced by others depicting laundresses, ironers, and milliners. Degas produced twenty-seven paintings of laundresses and ironers over a span of three decades. In Women Ironing (fig. 42), he captured not only the drudgery of the ironers’ work but also their uneasy social status in nineteenth-century Paris. One woman hunches over her task, bearing down on the iron with all the strength of her arms and shoulders. The other, clutching a wine bottle, stretches and yawns, her gaping mouth echoing the circles of the starched cuffs of the shirts stacked before her. As the shirts reminded the artist’s contemporaries, laundresses sometimes supplemented their meager incomes by prostitution, often with the men to whom they delivered laundry. They also suffered a reputation for alcoholism, as suggested by the bottle.51 Milliners ranked higher than ironers on the working-class social ladder— one contemporary called them “the aristocracy of the workwomen of Paris, the most elegant and distinguished”—but they, too, were assumed to be sexually available.'2 In The Millinery Shop (fig. 43), Degas sidestepped such issues to focus on the woman’s absorption in her creative task. Viewed as if by a pedestrian glancing through the shop window, she holds pins in her pursed lips as she puts the finishing touches on a hat. The composition is divided in half by an elaborate hat with dangling green ties. To the left are frilly and flowered hats, the products of the milliner’s skilled labor; to the right, the milliner herself, intent on completing another hat. Degas wittily positioned the central hat above the milliner’s head, so that she seems to be wearing one of her creations, although the luxurious chapeau upstages her modest shopgirl's dress. Labor was a significant theme for the Post-Impressionists Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat, but although the American Impressionists belonged to the same generation and undoubtedly saw their work in exhibitions in New York and Paris, they seem largely to have escaped their influence. Instead, looking beyond Kurope for inspiration, the Americans

4X

Fig. 42. 1 dgar Degas (French, 18.34-1917) Women Ironing, c. 1884 Oil on canvas, 32 3/8 x 29 3/4 in. Norton Simon Art Foundation (M.1971.3 P/M. 1979. 17.P)

Fig. 43. Kdgar Degas (French, 1834-191"’) The Millinery Shop, 1884-90 Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 \ 4 3 1/2 in. The Art Institute ot Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. 1 arned l oburn Memorial (. oliection (193 3.428)

found fresh variants on the labor theme in the art of Japan. Studies of the Japanese influence on Western art have focused on style, including bold compositions, odd viewpoints, innovative layering of space, flat colors, and interest in pattern.

Subject matter has been largely overlooked, apart

from noting an affinity between the Impressionists’ attention to bourgeois leisure and the Japanese printmakers’ portrayals of the “floating world” of the pleasure quarters. 4 But although many ukiyo-e prints depict geishas and actors, many others portray manual laborers: farmers, fishermen, porters, loggers, carpenters, and so on. Such prints were admired and collected by the American Impressionists. Robinson described some “fine” Japanese prints he saw at an exhibition in New York, including two that depicted workers: “One, a building with scaffolding, work going on; another, a crowded bridge, quays, etc.” Two months later, he noted that Weir had traded a Millet drawing for some Japanese prints, one of which Robinson described as “a charming landscape—moon rising—a lake with fishermen—willows.”" I he print Robinson singled out, Hiroshige’s Trout Fishing in the Tama River in Moonlight (fig. 44), indicates that Weir replaced an image of French laborers with one of Japanese. Weir’s affinity for the ukiyo-e tradition of seasonal work, as in Trout Fishing, is evident in his oil The Ice Cutters (cat. 16). Like Hiroshige, Weir animated a landscape with small-scale figures engaged in labor characteristic of the season. Weir, Robinson, and Twachtman attended Japanese print exhibitions together, assembled collections of their own, and pored over them on many companionable evenings. Much of Weir’s collection is now at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art in Provo, Utah, and Weir Farm Historic Site, Wilton, Connecticut.36 Robinson’s collection

Fig. 44. Ando Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) Trout Fishing in the Tama Rirer in Moonlight, from Inuges of Sanies of the Snouy Moon, 19th century Vi'oodcut, 9 \ 14 in. Brigham Young University Museum of Art

has been dispersed, but in his diaries he named the artists he collected.3' Twachtman\ collection is undocumented, but his art reveals the influence of Asian art more fully than that of his friends. Less interested in the labor theme than Weir or Robinson, Twachtman borrowed a strategy from a print in Weir’s collection, Hiroshige’s Fukagawa Lumberyards (fig. 45), for his View from the Holley House, Winter (cat. 23). Like the Japanese printmaker, Twachtman depicted a work sire when activity was muted bv winter. Snow seems to muffle sound in both works. Twachtman also adapted some Japanese compositional strategies. The foreground focus on the parasol in the print becomes a calligraphic swirl of paint in Twachtman’s oil. Hassam borrowed both imagery and content from Japanese prints for The Caulker (cat. 19) and The Mill Pond, Cos Cob (cat. 21). In the two paintings, the distant landscape is screened by a prominent foreground element: in one, the scaffolding in a shipyard, in the other, a floating ladder. This compositional device is evident throughout the various series of famous views by the Japanese masters Hokusai and Hiroshige. In his view of a lumberyard by the Tate River (fig. 46) for example, Hokusai tucked the iconic Mount Fuji into the upper right corner of the composition, which is dominated by laborers working among stacked or clustered firewood, planks, and bamboo poles. In their depictions of workers and work sites, the American Impressionists drew on a rich iconography, building on the achievements of American, European, and Asian predecessors. Absorbing diverse influences and integrating them with their own distinctive viewpoints, they reinvigorated one of the oldest themes in the history of art.

Fig. 45. Ando Hiroshige (Japanese. 1797-1858) hukjgju j I umberyards, from One-Hundred Views o/ Famous Places, c. 185t» Woodcut, 14 x 10 in. Brigham Young I’nisersits Museum of Art

Fig. 46. Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese,

1760-1849 Tatekawa in Hon jo, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1815 Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 9 5/4 x 14 1/8 in. 1 he Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1922 (JP 1285)

American Impressionist

In the 1870s, when the artists who would become known as the American Impressionists were beginning their careers, there was much talk abut finding fresh, specifically American subject matter. The Hudson River School’s theatrical vistas seemed passe and the paintings of long-ago days and faraway places that dominated exhibitions at the National Academy of Design were losing their appeal. John Ferguson Weir, who had achieved great success with his two industrial canvases, urged his compatriots to reject European and historical themes in favor of contemporary American ones. “Art does not consist of merely picturesque conceptions of costume; of painted contadinas decked in spangles and ribbons,” he wrote. Referring to Jean-Franqois Millet’s honest portrayals of French laborers, Weir declared, “Our own life is equally teeming with similar subjects, perhaps less happily clothed with quaintness, but far more worthy of engaging the thought of the painter than the ‘picturesque material’ which is often so cleverly and gracefully disposed in the pictures and workshops of inferior artists.”' As the first director of the Yale School of Fine Arts, Weir spoke with the voice of authority. His opinion carried weight not only with his younger half brother J. Alden Weir, just home from Paris, but within the wider art world. The critic W. Mackay Faffan echoed Weir’s advice, urging artists to paint ordinary American landscapes rather than foreign ones. Work sites predominate in his list of potential subject matter. “There shall be more joy over one honest and sincere American horse-pond, over one truthful and dirty tenement, over one unaffected sugar-refinery, or over one vulgar but unostentatious coal-wharf, than there shall be over ninety and nine Mosques of St. Sophia, Golden Horns, Normandy Cathedrals, and all the rest of the holy conventionalities and orthodox bosh that have gone to gladden the heart of the auctioneer and deprave American artists,” he wrote.2 In an article on summer sketching grounds published in 1885, Fizzie Champney noted that artists who earlier had painted European subjects were now seeking inspiration at home. She attributed this shift to market pressure: “The demand made by the public and the critics that the work of American artists should be American in subject at least, is largely conceded; and the varied scenes of our mountains and coasts, and our more pronounced and picturesque human types, are everywhere studied

5'

with avidity.” America’s “more pronounced and picturesque human types” were most likely farmers, fishermen, shipbuilders, and other blue-collar workers. When the Tile C lub, an artists' social group, took a barge trip on the Hudson m the summer of 1879, they passed lazy afternoons on their floating studio discussing subject matter. Sanford Gifford, one of the older members, compared the grandiose panoramas favored by his generation with the unpretentious vignettes of younger colleagues, including fellow excursionists William Merritt Chase, John H. Twachtrnan, and J. Alden Weir. “Simplicity alone has evaded us all along,” Gifford said of the older generation.4 The Tilers' predilection for views of w'orkers and work sites perplexed the barge captain’s wife, who told a reporter that the artists “took sketches of the strangest objects and not of pretty ones. . . . They caught her over the wash-tub one day, and, directly she appeared in a picture. Her daughter was feeding chickens one day, and they sketched her in that act. Every old mill or old shed delighted them.”' The scholar Randall Griffin has traced the search for American subject matter in the period between the end of the Cavil War and 1900, examining how Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Anshutz, Eastman Johnson, J. G. Brown, and a few other figurative painters responded to that impetus. Skipping over the American Impressionists as overly European, “sanitized, gentrified,” and nostalgic, he names the Urban Realists and early modernists as the figurative painters’ heirs in treating American themes.6 Granted, the American Impressionists sometimes chose subjects that evoke the past, but, as Griffin concedes, so did Homer. I maintain that the Impressionists were as concerned with national iconography as the Realists. Moreover, they frequently found those evocatively American subjects in the workplace. Theodore Robinson consistently chose labor themes throughout his career. Whether in Europe or America, he used images of workers to convey the essence of a place. In May 1883 he w'rote to fellow artist Kenyon Cox, “I have had, curiously enough, pretty nearly the same aims as regards subjects—since I began to draw years ago and my ideal was Winslow Homer. That is, country life and work, mostly out-doors.” In subject and style, the paintings Robinson produced on Nantucket in the summer of 1882, including Farmer with Scythe (fig. 47), reveal his debt to I lomer. A year later, however, he declared, “I have nearly got rid of the desire to do ‘American things’—mostly because American life is so unpaintable.” I he following spring, Robinson returned to France, where he lived for the next eight years. From 1888 through 1892 he lived in Giverny, where he enjoyed Claude Monet’s friendship. But even as he lightened his palette and loosened his brushstroke under Monet’s influence, Robinson retained his allegiance to Millet, finding most of his themes among the local peasants. He went so far as to have Marie, the Parisian

Si

Fig. 47. Theodore Robinson (American, 1852-1896) Fjnner with Scythe, 1882 Oil on canvas, 15 5/8 x 7 5/8 in. C ollection of Louise I’uschel

model with whom he had a long-term relationship, dress in country costume during her visits to Giverny, playing the role of a peasant (see cat. 43). Back in the United States, where he lived from December 1892 until his death in April 1896, Robinson portrayed farmers plowing, bargemen navigating canals, and women cooking, sewing, and doing laundry. The debate over subject matter engrossed Robinson and his colleagues. At a friend’s home in 1894, the discussion centered on “whether one should paint here or in Europe—the ‘national’ idea, Henry James, Garland and others talked of.”* The novelists Henry James and Hamlin Garland represented opposite responses to this dilemma. James lived in England, where he wrote about the complex interactions between Americans and Europeans. Garland, by contrast, took his themes from life in his native Midwest. In his manifesto Crumbling Idols, published in the spring of 1894, Garland declared, “As I write this, I have just come in from a beehunt over Wisconsin hills, amid splendors which would make Monet seem low-keyed. One school cannot copy or be based upon the other without loss. Each painter should paint his own surroundings, with nature for his teacher. ... [It is] my settled conviction that art, to be vital, must be local in its subject.”1' Garland pressed his ideas on Robinson in person, calling on him at his studio and giving him a copy of his pamphlet. Impressions on Impressionism, in which he promotes a combination of Impressionist style and American subject matter."1 Partly in response to Garland’s insistence that an artist could truly depict only the region of his birth, Robinson spent much of 1895 in Vermont, which he had left with his family as a small child. He responded enthusiastically to the subjects he found among the hill farms, including the typical New England barns. “We should paint them as in the old world one paints cathedrals or castles,” he wrote of the barns. “Weir has done this—Twachtman as well. And there are other things no doubt as one looks that are well worth the time, un-European as they may be and perhaps all the more for that.”11 Robinson had played an important role in the embrace of Impressionism by his compatriots. Now, some looked to him for leadership in the development of a self-consciously American art. When Robinson wrote to Harrison S. Morris, the influential director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, “let us shake off European trammels and old standards a bit and ‘see what we shall see,”’ Morris replied, “you will do an immense service by sticking to this leading idea. The younger fellows need just such a guide.”12 J. Alden Weir also depicted New England work sites—not only barns but also factories. He found both in Connecticut, where he and his family spent about six months of every year. At his farms in Branchville and Windham, Weir depicted the age-old tasks of each season: plowing, harvesting, collecting firewood, cutting ice. A more modern subject

awaited him in the industrial town of Willimantic, three miles from Windham: textile mills to which he devoted six canvases. Weir’s treatment of these two categories of labor subjects differ from one another in a fundamental way. The vast majority of the agricultural paintings include figures: ostensibly the quintessential Yankee farmer, but in fact more likely to be Weir's Alsatian caretaker. Hv contrast, the industrial paintings are, with one exception, unpopulated. At a time of anxiety about labor unrest, Weir eliminated any potentially disturbing glimpse of the mill workers. Weir’s art and experience fulfilled the prophesy of an Atlantic Monthly essayist, that the “primitive, rugged, wholesome life” of old New England

f

would be replaced by “a new New England, composed of large cities and manufacturing towns . . . and a remnant of farms worked by immigrant w 11

armers. 1

The peripatetic Childe Hassam sought out work scenes all over New England. His first biographer, Adeline Adams, suggested the range of his subject matter: “he chooses a blossoming fruit tree, the shimmer of birches, a vine, a veil of mist, a young girl on Easter morning, flower gardens, flower girls, and flowers by themselves. ... All this passion for whatever is lovely and fleeting does not prevent him from painting with zest men shingling the Baptist Church at Gloucester [cat. 5|, or building a schooner at Provincetown [cat. 20].”14 In Paris and New York, as well, Hassam depicted not only elegant promenaders but also bricklayers, construction workers, street sweepers, and hackney drivers. For the Pennsylvania Impressionists, about two decades younger than Robinson, Weir, and Hassam, labor was also a significant theme. Robert Spencer found his signature subject in the mills near New Hope, Pennsylvania. Perhaps as a result of the mood swings from which he suffered, Spencer alternated between sunny Impressionistic views of factory workers enjoying a break and somber renderings of their bleak tenements.1’ Eater, he worked in New York City, depicting the rough-andtumble life in the poorest neighborhoods. Although his subject matter set him apart from the renditions of genteel folk at leisure that were more characteristic of early-twentieth-century painting, Spencer denied that he was politically motivated. “Many people have made the mistake of thinking me Socialistic,” he wrote in an unpublished personal history. “Not at all. Socialism spells destruction to me. ... It is man, and not man’s theories that I’m interested in—and it is immaterial if the man lives on Fifth Avenue or over on Baxter Street. I'll admit I find Baxter Street, for the time being, a bit more interesting.”"’ Spencer’s disavowal was disingenuous. Since the late eighteenth century. New York’s Baxter Street and its neighborhood, l ive Points, had been the most notorious slum in America. Visitors including Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, and Jacob Riis had deplored the area’s degradation, disease, low life expectancy, and high crime rates. To express a preference for Baxter Street over Fifth

Avenue was to align oneself with society’s outcasts. Daniel Garber, Spencer’s friend and colleague in the New Hope art colony, occasionally depicted the traditional occupations of neighboring farmers as well as his wife’s domestic tasks of sewing and mending. In his only engagement with industrial subject matter, Garber repeatedly portrayed the quarries along the Delaware River near his home. Although the quarries scarred the bucolic landscape and disrupted the peace with the din of stone crushers, Garber depicted them in the same jewel tones he used for images of the nearby farms. Not all of the American Impressionists were equally devoted to scenes of labor. For some, it was an occasional subject rather than a primary one. John Singer Sargent portrayed oyster gatherers in France (see fig. 21), reapers in England, and marble cutters in Italy (cat. 30), but such images of labor were vastly outnumbered in his oeuvre by society portraits and genre paintings of patricians at ease. William Merritt Chase found his subjects in his own home and studio, which he decorated to express his identity as a cosmopolitan aesthete. Washing Day—A Backyard Reminiscence of Brooklyn (cat. 38) came early in his career, when the newly wed artist and his wife were living with his parents and younger sister in Brooklyn. He did not subsequently pursue themes of work, instead creating images of well-dressed people at leisure. Some artists seem to have found the Impressionist style incompatible with labor themes. In the late 1870s Twachtman painted gutsy views of New York harbor, delineating the industrial dredges, tugboats, barges, and commercial fishing boats in the dark colors and bravura brushwork he had learned in Munich. When he shifted to the cool colors and thin paint application of his French period, he also changed his subject matter, choosing quiet, minimalist landscapes that connote meditation, not action. And when he settled in Greenwich in 1889, Twachtman ignored the surrounding dairy farms and grain fields, devoting himself instead to reshaping his property into a garden, disguising its recent agricultural uses, and expressing on canvas his emotional response to it in all seasons. Only in Cos Cob and Gloucester did Twachtman choose work sites as his subject. In those waterfront settings, he depicted shipyards, fishing fleets, and commercial buildings, using them as starting points for near-abstract compositions. Whether or not they chose labor as a primary theme, many of the artists represented in this exhibition demonstrated their compassion for those who lost their jobs in the economic depression that began in 1893, when a series of railroad bankruptcies caused banks to call in their loans. The depression dragged on for four years, during which time unemployment nationwide reached 25 percent. In New York alone, twenty thousand were homeless.1" Robinson, Weir, fellow artist Caroline Coventry Haynes, and a Mrs. Jones met in February 1894 to arrange what Robinson described as

an “appeal to the artists . . . to raise money for the poor.”1* Their concern was timely; the New York Times reported that the United Charities had received 436 new applications for aid—a record number—in the week ending January 20. Over the next two months, the artists solicited artwork from their colleagues and organized an exhibition at the Klackner Gallery featuring work by Chase, Hassam, Robinson, Twachtman, Weir, and others. “Finished at last arranging the Charity Sale—over 80 things— some very good. Twachtman did the hanging and did it quickly and well,” Robinson noted on April 7. Although Robinson was disappointed that “most things were sacrificed” because attendance was not “very swell— the lady patronesses being mostly absent,” the auction on April 12 realized a total of $1,200, a significant sum at the time.1'' In that troubled economic climate, the American Impressionists reconciled the labor theme with the bright outlook associated with their chosen style and embedded in the American psyche by employing a variety of strategies. Among them were idealization, distancing, abstraction, concealment, and erasure. Weir’s Ploughing for Buckwheat (cat. 17) exemplifies the subtle idealization occasionally practiced by the Impressionists. Five years before he painted this canvas, Weir had participated in one of the great events of the American Renaissance, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There, he decorated a dome in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building with allegorical figures representing the Art of Painting, the Goldsmith’s Art, the Art of Pottery, and Decorative Art. Compared with that project, Ploughing for Buckwheat seems to be a realistic glimpse of an unremarkable moment. Aspects of the painting compel a Symbolist reading, however. The plowman’s exaggerated height is extended by the whip he flicks over his head as he controls the mighty oxen with one hand. His impractical white shirt, the brightest point in the composition, draws the viewer’s eyes to his commanding presence. His features are barely indicated; not an individual, he is the quintessential American Farmer. Distancing allowed the Impressionists to omit the unattractive aspects of a working landscape. Garber’s Down the River (Quarry) (cat. 26), Hassam s Ice on the Hudson (cat. 28), and Spencer’s Across the River (cat. 33) all exemplify this tactic. In Garber’s view of a distant quarry, the shacks, machinery, smoke, dust, and rubble fade away, leaving only the exposed golden rock to complement the violet-blues of the apparently unspoiled landscape. I he factories in Hassam’s and Spencer’s paintings are architectural accents in nature, their unlovely details too far away to detect. Abstraction served a similar function. Twachtman’s view from the porch of the Holley House (cat. 23) encompassed a run-down shipyard, where piles of coal and scraps of lumber littered the shoreline. But Iwachtman depicted the shipyard in winter, when snow covered the debris and minimized detail. He reduced the sheds to simple geometric

shapes, creating a serene, abstract pattern from the rustic vernacular architecture. Artists sometimes concealed a feature that disturbed the effect they intended. Weir hid a large textile mill behind a grove of trees in US. Thread Company Mills, Willimantic, Connecticut (cat. 35). Hassam allowed only a glimpse of the construction workers outside the window in Tanagra (The Builders, New York) (fig. 48). As a last resort, an artist might simply erase an undesirable clement, as Weir eliminated railroad tracks from the deceptively bucolic landscape of Willimantic Thread Factory (cat. 34). The American Impressionists have been justly accused of nostalgia. Although they favored preindustrial, unmechanized labor, they painted what they saw. Not all farmers bought the newest plow or reaper the moment it came on the market; not all housewives owned the most upto-date washing machine. Some might argue that by depicting factory workers not on the assembly line but on a break, Spencer was prettifying reality, but respite from work was as much a part of the mill workers’ lives as was work itself. Realism with a capital R insists on the harsher elements of life, but lower-case realism can encompass the sunny days as well as the stormy ones. Although the American Impressionists painted during a period of sweeping socioeconomic change, the optimism that had characterized the United States from the beginning persisted in society and found expression in their paintings. Validating the factual basis for that optimism, the critic, editor, and fiction writer William Dean Howells wrote at the turn of the century that in a country blessed by a “large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life,” it was only realistic that novelists (and, by extension, painters) “concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American.”^1

Fig. 48. Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935) Tanagra (The Builders, New York), 1918 Oil on canvas, 58 3/4 x 58 5/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, (nit of John Gellatly (1929.6.63)

Catalogue

The City

“We live in the age of great cities,” an observer wrote in 1887. “It began to be so named nearly half a century ago, and every year since then has added fitness to the title. For size, for number, and for influence, the cities of our time have never been approached.”' Responding to that stimulus, the French Impressionists announced their modernity beginning in the late 1860s by depicting those parts of Paris recently opened to light and air under the supervision of Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann. The city’s new grands boulevards, inviting parks, and lively nightlife offered the quintessential^ modern subject for painters intent on creating a modern style.- Some two decades later, the American Impressionists followed their French predecessors' lead in portraying urban leisure. In Paris, Childc Hassam devoted his first truly Impressionist canvas to the stylish parade of carriages en route to one of the capital’s great social events, the Grand Prix horse race in the Bois de Boulogne (fig. 49). Back in the United States, Hassam depicted well-dressed New Yorkers strolling in a park or along prestigious stretches of Fifth Avenue or Broadway. William Merritt Chase painted in Prospect Park and Central Park from about 1885 to 1890; Willard Metcalf painted bird’s-eye views of Battery Park and Central Park in the early twentieth century; and Colin Campbell Cooper made New York’s skyscrapers his specialty from 1902 until 1921.

Work is, at best, a subtext in most of these cityscapes. A street sweeper might push his broom at the edge of Hassam’s Washington Arch, Spring (fig. 50), for example, but the focus is on the elegant pedestrians and the impressive architecture. The marginalization of labor derives partly from market forces—a potential patron would presumably prefer an image of a beautiful woman in embroidered silks to one of a laborer in denim overalls

and

partly from the anxieties that accompanied widespread social change. In the decades after the Civil War, a flood of job seekers left the farms for the cities, in the process changing the United States from a predominant!) agiarian nation to a predominantly manufacturing one. I he population shift concentrated low-income workers in the metropolitan areas, a trend that, in some observers, provoked fear of urban anarchy and violent labor uprisings

Fig. 49. Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935) l.e Jour de GrjnJ Prix, 1888 Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. New Britain Museum of American Art, Grace Judd l anders Fund. (1913.14)

Fig. 50. Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935) Washington Arch, Spring, 1890 Oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 22 1/2 in. Acquired 1921, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

like- those that erupted between 1879 and 1889. “This transplantation,” one writer warned, “swells the number of the classes most exposed to agitation and discontent, intensifies the dangers to be apprehended from social upheavals, and widens the growing chasm between the classes.”4 Augmenting the internal migration, successive waves of foreign immigrants poured into New York between 1880 and World War I. The city’s diversity represented an unprecedented opportunity for its artists and writers, the British journalist David Christie Murray wrote in the New York Herald in 1895. Murray’s column “interests me,” Theodore Robinson noted in his diary before copying out a long quotation from it: You may find more types in a day, and have more opportunity for their study, than in a week elsewhere. To me New York seems alive with unwritten stories—if a distinctly novel man is to come with a distinctly novel method—it will be here that he will show himself—here he will find a new world to fit his new inspiration. There never was, there is not now, and in all probability there never again will be such another mixture, such another variety of life, such another throbbing pulse of human movement as one finds in America/ Although New York’s diversity intrigued Robinson, he and his Impressionist colleagues ignored it when they took up palette and brush. They left that subject for their successors, the Urban Realists (sometimes called the Ashcan School), who portrayed the picturesque bustle of immigrant enclaves on New York’s Lower East Side.6 The American Impressionists also revealed their ambivalence toward architectural change in urban life. At times they celebrated modernity; at other times they turned their backs on it in favor of vignettes redolent of tradition. Hassam chose one of the newest, trendiest sections of his native city for the first of his street scenes, Rainy Day, Boston (fig. 51). The setting of that painting, Columbus Avenue, was built in emulation of the broad new boulevards in Paris, and Hassam’s rendering of it may have been inspired by the paintings of his French contemporaries/ During the same period that Hassam was depicting modern Boston, Robinson portrayed that city’s oldest neighborhood, Beacon Hill (cat. 7). The two artists (who were probably not acquainted at the time) offer very different views of Boston, Hassam depicting the new and stylish, Robinson the old and workaday. Instead of sleek black carriage horses trotting toward us as in Hassam’s painting, Robinson presents us with the rumps of shaggy dray horses bent over their feed. And instead of the gleaming up-to-date asphalt in which Hassam caught the reflections of pedestrians and carriages, Robinson depicted Beacon Street when it was torn up for repair. The aggregate stone base lends the historic street the rough surface of an unpaved country lane. Just as Hassam sought aspects of modernity in Boston, he frequently celebrated the vibrant chic of Haussmanized Paris during his years in France. Le Jour de Grand Prix (see fig. 49) is one of his many renditions of the stylish new boulevards. But for two paintings featuring workers, Hassam chose instead the quiet streets of the old Paris. Rue Montmartre (car. 2) is set on a twisting, cobblestone street where pedestrians make their way, not to a lively cafe, but to the local church. Le Val-de-Grdce, Spring Morning (cat. 1) depicts a nondescript street

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tic 51. Childc Hassam (American, 1859-1935) Ramy Day, Boston, 1885 Oil on canvas, 26 1/8 x 48 in. lulcdn Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott l lbhey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott (1956.53)

hemmed in by stone walls. In these two canvases, the city’s workers—its flower vendors and carriage drivers—no less than its architecture convey the essence of Paris. Hassam captured the sense of urban isolation in l.e Val-deGrace. The weary coachman, the flower vendor trundling her cart, the women with market baskets, all inhabit separate, self-contained worlds despite their physical propinquity. In Rue Montmartre, the flower vendor’s solitariness is intensified by the fact that she alone, on this sunny Sunday morning, is working. The American Impressionists played on the contrast between work and leisure, proletarian and patrician, in other urban vignettes. In Robinson’s Beacon Street, Boston (cat. 7) that distinction is inscribed on the sidewalk. On one side of the long shadow cast by the top railing of the park fence, a workman tends draft horses; on the other, an elegant woman strolls along the edge of Boston Common. 1 his casual juxtaposition of classes, so characteristic of urban life, differed dramatically from the intimate, closed worlds of home and rural village. 1 he anonymity of the modern city brought a certain freedom, which the Impressionists subtly conveyed. Robinson’s female contemporaries might have envied the woman he depicts out for a solitary stroll. One of them, the twentyeight-year-old Mina Fonda, chafed at the restrictions of country life during a summer back home in New Hampshire after enjoying relative independence as an art student in New York in the 1880s. She complained in a letter to her fiance, Leonard Ochtman, that her parents forbade her to sketch alone out of sight of the house. “I declare I will have a revolver or a watch dog another year, and go where I please,” she vowed.' Another characteristic of modern urban life, the construction that resulted from rapid growth, also inspired the American Impressionists. New York’s population swelled from about 515,600 in 1850 to almost 3.5 million in 1900.9 Between 1900 and 1910 the population soared to 4.8 million.10 To serve that expanding population, new residential, commercial, and transportation projects were undertaken throughout the city. With improvements in the passenger elevator and the development of steel-frame construction, taller buildings than ever before possible sprang up, condensing more and more inhabitants on a limited architectural footprint. Contemporaries recognized the proliferation of construction projects as emblematic of New York: a real-estate journal reported that between 1899 and 1903 an average of $120 million annually was spent on new buildings in New York, far exceeding the per capita average of any other American city.11 Ernest Lawson recorded one of the era’s most important public works projects, Pennsylvania Station (cat. 6). Younger than the other Impressionists and revealing some affinity for his Urban Realist colleagues in the Eight, Lawson depicted, not the civic grandeur of the completed building, but the raw, earth-moving ambition of its construction. Hassam, by contrast, conveyed the personal impact of the fast-growing city in The Bricklayers (cat. 4), a view from his apartment. During a stay in New York, Hassam’s friend John H. Twachtman contrasted such a cramped vista to the panoramas he enjoyed in the country: “in the morning I shall wake up and

no

not walk

out onto the upper porch to see what the day is like—but look down into an airshaft. In his Window Series of about 1910 to 1919, Hassam reduced the view of the city to a glimpse from heavily curtained windows. In Tanagra (The Builders, New York) (see fig. 48), he contrasted the sheltered world of leisure the woman inhabits with the larger world of male energy embodied in the construction workers building a skyscraper outside her window. Hassam called attention to the distinction in the subtitle he ga\e his painting and the meaning he assigned its iconography. The bulbs blooming on the windowsill, he explained, w ere intended to “symbolize grow'th—beautiful growth—the growth of a great city hence the sub-title I he Builders, New 5oik. As Hassam grew older, his delight in New York waned, but he retained his lifelong fascination with the theme of labor. During a visit to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1919, he combined that abiding interest with another subject that had previously brought him acclaim: a New England church. In f .hurt h at East Gloucester (cat. 5), the old is made new, both by the unseen carpenters who are repairing the church and by the artist who discovered in it a fresh rake on a favorite theme.

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i. Childe Hassarn

Le Val-de-Grace, Spring Morning, 1888

The city inspired the first of Hassam’s paintings that garnered significant critical notice and became one of his major themes. He began his career as an illustrator while taking night classes in art in Boston.1 2 His earliest oils portray rural labor, the style and subject influenced by JeanFrantjois Millet and Winslow Homer. Beginning in 1885 he turned his attention to everyday life in Boston, depicting pedestrians on the rain-slicked streets of the newly developed South End and the snow-covered Boston Common. Accompanied by his wife, Maud, Hassarn sailed for Paris in the autumn of I 887 and enrolled at the Academie Julian, a favorite of American artists completing their professional training in France. The Hassams took a studio-apartment on the edge of Montmartre, first at 11, boulevard Clichy and then a larger one a short distance away, at 35, boulevard Rochechouart. During the next two years, the artist roamed the city to capture the vibrant life of its old and new quarters. He discovered some motifs on the GhampsFlysees and other notable sites of the recently modernized Paris and crossed the Seine to the Left Bank for others, including Le Val-de-Grace, Spring Morning. Paris stirs to life as the rising sun casts a rosy glow on the wet streets and cloudy sky. A weary cabdriver slumps over the reins; a flower vendor trundles her cart to her customary corner; women with market baskets set out to do the day’s shopping. In the distance, the dome of the church of Val-de-Grace crowns the horizon. The church was commissioned by Anne of Austria in fulfillment of her promise to build a magnificent church if, after twentythree years of childless marriage, she gave birth to a son. To bear a child for the first time at age thirty-seven is difficult today, but in 1638, when the future Louis XIV was born, it was deemed miraculous. The young king himself laid the foundation stone in 1645; construction was completed about 1666. Anne of Austria entrusted the design first to Francois Mansart, then to Jacques Lemercier, and, after Lemercier’s death, to Pierre Le Muet and Gabriel Le Due. The latter designed the lead and gilt dome, considered one of the finest in France. It was the dome, a nineteenth-century guidebook advised, “that merits all our attention. The dome of Val-de-Grace is one of the many imitations of the dome of Saint Peter’s, and the one that has best succeeded. This elegantly curved cupola . . . dominates the Paris horizon between the Pantheon and the Invalides,”1 two other landmarks of the Left Bank. In Hassam’s painting, the sun is not bright enough to reveal the rich Baroque ornamentation of the dome. Only its contour, instantly recognizable to Parisians and knowledgeable visitors, emerges in the soft light of dawn. The imposing religious and architectural landmark dignifies an unremarkable street and the activities of the self-contained pedestrians, connecting their daily tasks with the continuum of history. Sensitive as always to class stratifications, Hassarn exposed distinctions even among workers. Both the flower seller and the hackney driver provide services for those more prosperous than they, but the vendor—on foot and pushing a cart—occupies a lower rung on the working-class social ladder than the liveried cabbie, riding high. Horse-drawn vehicles and their drivers were favorite motifs for Hassarn in Boston, Paris, and, later. New York. The artist usually depicted them as an aspect of fashionable urban life, as for example in I.e Jour de Grand Prix (see fig. 49). He frequently conveyed the sense of community enjoyed by the drivers, who talk with colleagues while awaiting fares, as in Cab Stand at Night, Madison Square (cat. 3). Here, however, the cabby’s loneliness and fatigue are undisguised. Hassarn sensitively captured an unguarded moment at the start of a showery spring day. SGL

64

1. I he* most complete studs of Hassarn is H. Barbara Weinberg et al., Childe Hassarn, American Impressionist, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004). 2. Michel Poisson, I'jris Buildings and Monuments (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999|, pp. 190-91; and Delia (>ra\-Durant, Paris and Versailles, Blue (mide (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 1 16. rans illustre (Paris: l.ibrairie de 1. Hachette, 1855), p. 168; my translation.

1. Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 18591935 Hast Hampton, New York I l.e Val-de-Grtice, Spring Morning, 1888 Oil on canvas, lf> 3/4 \ 24 in. Private Collection, Washington, D.C.

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2. Childe Hassam Rue Montmartre, 1889

In contrast to the stylish people and broad avenues Hassam depicted in some of his Parisian canvases, he found inspiration for others on the narrow, twisting streets of the Butte de Montmartre, just a short walk from his studio. Late-nineteenth-century guidebooks listed Montmartre as a place where visitors could find clean, simple, modestly priced accommodations. Many avant-garde artists lived in the neighborhood; in Hassam’s day they included Vincent van (iogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat. But instead of the lively cafes and nightclubs the Europeans portrayed, Hassam was attracted to vignettes of village life. Rue Montmartre is one of several paintings depicting girls in white dresses wending their way up the butte’s steep streets to their first communion or confirmation. For Hassam, a New England Protestant who told a friend in 1887, “I haven’t said a prayer or thought one since I was a bit of a boy,”1 2 the rituals of Catholic Paris were as picturesque as the city’s flower vendors and old neighborhoods. He sent a canvas titled Communion Morning (unlocated) to his one-man show in Boston in March 1889. Another oil. Confirmation Day, is dated 1889 (Christie’s, New York, May 19, 2005, lot 160). A third canvas, Spring Morning, Rue Mont Cenis (unlocated; illustrated in Christie’s, New York, June 1, 1984, lot 103) depicts a young girl in a white dress standing near the summit of a steep street. Rue Montmartre captures the village atmosphere, working-class inhabitants, and hilly topography of the quarter. It depicts a typical rue in Montmartre, but not the rue Montmartre, a heavily trafficked commercial thoroughfare some distance from the butte. The site of Hassam’s painting appears to be at a different point on the street the artist rendered in Montmartre (1889, Ball State University Art Gallery). The locale of that canvas has been identified as the place du Tertre.' The heart of Montmartre, the place du Tertre is also the terminus of the rue du Mont Cenis, the site of the related painting of a girl in white dress and veil. One of the oldest churches in Paris, St.-Pierre-de-Montmartre (1 134), overlooks the place du Tertre and was the likely destination of the veiled young women in Hassam’s Rue Montmarte. (The Basilica of Sacre-Coeur, then under construction, was completed in 1891.) Here, as in other depictions of flower vendors, Hassam used the bright blossoms to inject color into the monochromatic cityscape. Street-corner florists were a familiar sight throughout Paris, bringing a simple luxury to working-class residents like the women in black dresses covered with blue or white aprons in Hassam’s painting. His composition guides our path from the crimson petals on the sidewalk at the lower left up the curving diagonal of the cobbled street to the tall building, where red and yellow cloths draped over the balcony railings repeat the flowers’ hues. SGL

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1. Hassam made that statement in a letter from Paris to Rose Lamb in Boston dated March 9, 1887, transcribed in Ulrich W. Heisinger, Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (Munich: Prestel, 1994), p. 177. 2. \ nineteenth-century French guidebook describes the rue Montmartre as a wide, noisy street congested with carriages of various types and lined by immense fashionable shops, splendid cafes, and houses of modern construction; Vans illustre (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1855), p. 68. '• Alain (i. Joyaux, Brian A. Moore, and Ned II. Griner, Childe Hassam in Indiana, exh. cat. l.Vluncie, Ind.: Ball State University Art Gallery, 1985), p. 28.

2. Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 18391935 Fast Hampton, New York) Rue Montmartre, 1889 Oil on canvas, 18 x 15 in. Spanierman Gallery, LI (

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3. Childe Hassam Cab Stand at Night, Madison Square, 1891

Hassam frequently depicted hackney drivers in Boston (see fig. 51) and Paris. In New York, where he settled in late 1889, he again found inspiration in cabs and cabbies. In contrast to Le Val-de-Crace, Spring Mornitig (cat. 1), in which Hassam captured the isolation of a solitary driver, here he portrayed a convivial group on New York’s Madison Square whiling away the time between fares. Madison Square is bounded on the east and west by Madison and Fifth Avenues and on the north and south by Twenty-sixth and Twenty-third Streets. The cab stand Hassam depicted was on the square’s west side, where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue.' The center of the hotel district, it was a lucrative site for hackney drivers. When Hassam showed this painting or a very similar one to an interviewer in 1892, the writer remarked, ‘“What a Dickens flavor there is to those cabbies, settling themselves down into their great-coats, trying to keep warm. . . . And how much character there is to this one’s back.’” Laughing, Hassam agreed, “‘there is no end of material in the cabbies. Their backs are quite as expressive as their faces. They live so much in their clothes, that they get to be like thin shells, and take on every angle and curve of their tempers as well as their forms.’” Hassam also explained how he produced nocturnes like this one. “If I want to observe night effects carefully, I stand out in the street with my little sketch-book, draw figures and shadows, and note down in colored crayons the tones seen in the sky, in the snow, in the reflections or in a gas lamp shining through the haze. I worked in that way for this bit of a street scene in winter under electric light.” In Cab Stand at Night, Hassam contrasted the warm glow of gaslights with the theatrical glare of electric street lamps, which had been installed on Broadway between Union Square and Madison Square in December 1880.' “‘The effect of the light in the squares of the Empire City can scarcely be described, so weird and so beautiful is it,’ wrote a British visitor in 1882. From tall standards, ‘erected in the centre of each square,’ light was ‘thrown down upon the trees in such a way as to give a fairy-like aspect.’”1 2 * 4 5 6 Hassam captured the novel beauty of electric light on the snow, exploiting it to reduce his palette to variations of blue, white, and orange. Already, he conceded, “a great many people think my pictures are too blue.” Accustomed to the rich golden-brown tones favored by an earlier generation—those Hassam dismissed as “the molasses and bitumen school”— conservative gallerygoers were shocked by the preponderance of blue in Hassam’s paintings. He further challenged their conservative sensibilities with the modernity of his subject. The words Electric Light are inscribed on the back of this painting, which may be the one of that title that was exhibited at the Society of American Artists in 1891. It may also have been shown at Hassam’s solo exhibition in Boston in 1893 as Effect of Electric Light on the Snow (Madison Square) and sold at the American Art Galleries in 1896 as Effect of Electric Light on the Snow, Madison Square."

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1. Sot- H. Barbara Weinberg et al., Childc Hassant, American Impressionist, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), p. 106. 2. A. I . Ives, " lalks with Artists: Mr. (Tilde Ilassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 2” (October 1892), pp. 116-17, reprinted in Ulrich Hiesinger, Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich: Prestel, 1994i, p. 180. v Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: Xeu• York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present i New York: New York University Press, 1956), p. 209. 4. 5. 6. p.

lames I). \lc( abe, Xeic York by Sunlight and Gaslight (1882), quoted in Still, Mirror for Gotham, pp. 209-10. Ives, "lalks with Artists," in Hiesinger, Childe Hassam, p. 180. Notes from the Smith College Museum of Art curatorial tile, quoted in Weinberg et al., C hilde Hassam, 11~ n. 99. 1 hese exhibitions are listed in Weinberg et al., pp. 376 and 378.

3. Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859— 1935 hast Hampton, New York) Gib Stand at Sight, Madison Square, 1891 Oil on paper, 8 15/16 x 14 3/8 in. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Bequest of Annie Swan Coburn (Mrs. Lewis-Lamed Coburn) tSC! 1934:3-2)

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4- Cliilde Hassam The Bricklayers, 1905

On his return to the United States from France in late 1889, Hassam settled in New York and quickly became recognized as its leading artistic chronicler. In many paintings, he presented New York as the elegant rival to Paris, hiding any ugliness under the flattering veil of snow, fog, or night. In The Bricklayers, however, his uncompromising vantage point confronts the viewer with the restriction of personal space that is characteristic of urban life. Hassam probably painted this view of construction workers from the window of his apartment and studio at 27 West Sixty-seventh Street. He and his wife had moved to that cooperative building, erected by a group of artists, in 1903. The apartment’s windows originally provided extensive views eastward over Central Park. Within a year, however, construction began on a building that would block views of the park: a new parish house for the Second Church of Christ, Scientist on the southwest corner of Sixty-eighth Street.' In The Hovel and the Skyscraper (fig. 52), Hassam recorded work on the new building and the snow-covered park beyond it. By 1905, when he painted The Bricklayers, construction had nearly reached the level of Hassam’s window; it appears that he could have reached out to shake hands with the masons. Although the painting’s close-up viewpoint and small scale convey a sense of intimacy, the workers avoid eye contact. Hassam constructed his composition in a manner analogous to that of the builders. The dark vertical supports that frame the construction also frame the view. He employed the characteristic broken brushstroke of Impressionism, with which a painter constructs an image, as an analogue to brick, with which a mason builds a wall. Like the masons, Hassam built up the wall brick by brick, stroke by stroke. The construction work that inspired this engaging picture put the new building uncomfortably close to Hassam’s apartment, perhaps prompting his move in 1908 to a new cooperative building at 130 West Fifty-seventh Street. SGL

Hi;. 52. ( hilde Hassam (American, 1859-1935) / he Hovel and the Skyscraper, 1404 Oil on canvas, 34 3/4 x 31 in. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. The Vivian O. Potamkin C ollection. Bequest ot Vivian O. Potamkin

1. H. Barbara Weinberg, “Hassam in New York, 1X9“-19|9,” m Weinberg et al., Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), pp. 205, 209. See also the Chronology in the same publication for Hassam’s New York residences.

4. Childc Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859— 1935 Hast Hampton, New York) The Bricklayers, 1905 Oil on canvas hacked by panel, 7 3/4 x 12 3/4 in. Private collection courtesy of Owen (iallery

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5. Childc Hassam Church at East Gloucester, 1919

Among Hassam’s most famous paintings are views of stately churches in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. He depicted Old Lyme’s First Congregational Church in 1903, 1905, and 1906. In 1918 he produced The Church at Gloucester, an iconic image of the Universalist meetinghouse.1 Church at East Gloucester marks a departure from the earlier oils. Whereas the steeples in those canvases rise unencumbered to the sky, scaffolding sheaths the rower of the Hast Gloucester edifice, implying workaday activity that is absent from the earlier canvases. T he Baptist Church on Chapel Street in blast Gloucester was built in 1858, remodeled in 1869 and again in 1891.“’ Thus, it was much newer than the meetinghouses in Old Lyme, constructed in 1817, and Gloucester, erected in 1806. Set near the waterfront among rocky pastures where cows grazed, it evoked the quintessential New England community. The building on piers to the right of the steeple is one of the many wharves that lined Gloucester harbor. Hassam created a rural background for his landscape by choosing a vantage point that bypassed the densely built center of Gloucester, just across the Inner Harbor from Chapel Street, encompassing instead the thickly wooded Stage Fort Park and Magnolia shore across Western Harbor. The painting in this exhibition is a smaller and slightly different version of Shingling the First Baptist Church, Gloucester (1919, private collection). For Hassam, the New England meetinghouse represented not a place of worship, but an emblem of Anglo-American tradition. As a boy, he had attended a Unitarian church; after his death, an Episcopal priest officiated at his funeral.’ In the intervening years, religion seems to have played no part in his life. But although Hassam was not a regular churchgoer, he cherished the beauty of New England’s meetinghouses throughout his life. He had long been attracted to geometric patterns and views of construction, so that the scaffolding would only have added to the scene’s appeal. To the conservative artist, who was troubled by the rapid changes in American life, including the influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants, the repair work must also have offered comforting reassurance of continuity. I he church Hassam depicted was destroyed by fire in 1921. Three years later, a new building was erected on the same site. Now known as the East Gloucester Community Church, it is in a different architectural style than the one Hassam depicted. SGL

I. For more on those- paintings, see Susan (.. Larkin, “Hassam in New England,” in H. Barbara Weinberg et al., Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, e\h. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), pp. 158, 162-6 ?, 169-71. I am grateful to Stephanie Buck, 1 ibrarian, C ape Ann Historical Association, for identifying and providing background information on the church in East Gloucester. > Hassam attended Sunday school and services at a Unitarian church in Dorchester, according to autobiographical notes he rote in 1 * >' 1 lassam Papers, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.t.. reel NAA1, frame ~42). According to the East Hampton Star, “Rev. W illiam Grainger, rector of St. 1 uke's I piscop.il t hurch here, read the simple prayer-book service" at the artist's home; "Funeral Services Held Here tor Ghilde Hassam," September 5, 19?5, Ghilde Hassam Papers and Correspondence, AAAI, AAA, reel NAA1, frame 651.

5. Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859-1935 East Hampton, New York) Church at East Gloucester, 1919 Oil on mahogany panel, 13 1/8 x 16 1/4 in. Bowers Museum of C ultural Art, Santa Ana, California

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6. Frnest Lawson

Excavation--Penn Station, c. 1906

Lawson’s Excavation—Penn Station celebrates the big dig that riveted New York’s attention in the opening years of the twentieth century. In 1901 the Pennsylvania Railroad announced plans to tunnel under the Hudson River and construct an imperial terminal heralding its grand entry into the heart of midtown Manhattan. Past the terminal, tracks would continue under the island and under the East River, providing a direct link from Pennsylvania Station to its Long Island line. In one fell swoop the Pennsylvania Railroad would bring freight and long¬ distance passengers into the center of Manhattan, while encouraging the growth of New Jersey and Long Island suburbs through its commuter service. To clear the twenty-eight-acre site bordered by Seventh and Ninth Avenues, West Thirty-third and West Thirty-first Streets, the railroad had to acquire and demolish more than four hundred small commercial and residential buildings on the western edge of the disreputable Tenderloin district. The runnel technology was cutting edge, relying on innovative use of the still-new power of electricity. The excavation, however, offered age-old drama—man, the great mover of rock. Blasting forty feet below street level, deep into the bedrock of Manhattan Island, workers excavated a giant hole to accommodate multiple layers of tunnels, trains, and platforms. In the popular imagination (fueled by the publication of many photographs and artists’ renderings), this was Manhattan’s Panama Canal, a wonder of technology, engineering, and grit.1 Lawson was the man to paint it. He had studied landscape painting in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in 1892 and 1893 with John H. Twachtman and J. Alden Weir. In 1893 he went to Moret-sur-Loing, France, where he met Alfred Sisley, a preeminent Impressionist interpreter of the landscape. From 1898 to about 1906 the artist lived in Washington Heights, the hilly community at the northern end of Manhattan that was just beginning to be transformed from rural to suburban. Lawson found all the landscape he required close to home. He began to paint the dramatic geology of his still bucolic surroundings, the steep hills and rivers that defined its perimeter. When he moved to Greenwich Village, the center of a burgeoning artists’ bohemia, he continued to take all of Manhattan, man-made as well as natural, for subject matter. Living downtown put Lawson conveniently close to the social circle around Robert Henri, the charismatic artist and teacher who urged his friends and students to find inspiration for their art in the vitality of the city. Lawson shared a natural affinity with the so-called Ashcan painters, with whom he had exhibited as early as 1903. William Inness Homer describes Lawson’s appeal to Henri’s “artistic rebels.” Lawson was an Impressionist, bur his was not the “academic, sentimentalized version of Impressionism. . . . His brushwork was bold and free, lacking in ‘refinement’. . . . His colors were uniformly intense. . . . And he frequently painted the less genteel aspects of the urban landscape—bridges, railroads and squatters’ huts along the riverbanks.” His art, in the words of a contemporary critic, was “manly and free from trick." The culmination of Lawson’s relationship with Henri’s circle was his participation as one of the Fight in the landmark exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in 1908. Lawson chose a daytime view for his depiction of the excavation. True to his preference for high horizons, he painted a man-made landscape, an awesome pit created by workmen whose tiny figures belie their strength. I he rock had first to be dynamited, a process fraught with danger. In the pit Lawson painted workers clearing away the rocky debris from a recent round of dynamiting. In the left foreground puffs of steam from a railway engine indicate the presence of a car of the rail line specially constructed through the site to carry away the rubble.

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6. b'rnest Lawson (Halifax, Nova Scotia 18731937 Miami Beach, Florida) Excavation—Penn Station, c. 1906 Oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 24 1/4 in. Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Universit> of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Bequest ol Hudson D. Walker from the lone and Hudson D. Walker Collection

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Excavation equipment including railway cars, steam shovels, and drilling bores dot the landscape above the pit, indicating the next area to be dug. The workers on this higher level approximate stick figures. Lawson’s interest in this canvas is the project itself—the combination of man and power machinery that reconfigures the face of the island. His palette is subdued—browns, greens, and blacks punctuated by white wafts of steam. This is the “black Impressionism” of Henri and Hdouard Manet in contrast to the “palette of crushed jewels” that Lawson typically favored/ Lawson did not generally date his pictures. Since excavation did not begin until July 1, 1904, and Lawson showed the picture in a solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1907, the work must have been painted in 1905 or 1906. James B. Moore, the jovial, generous, and soon bankrupt proprietor of the Cafe Francis, acquired Excavation Penn Station. Frank Crane, a friend of John Sloan, purchased the painting at the auction of Moore’s collection on April 27, 1908.'

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1. I his discussion is indebted to Marianne Doezema, George Bellous and Urban America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), chapter 1, "Ihe Excavation," especially pp. 1 St-65. 2. W illiam limes Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 102. '■ News and Notes of the Art World,” The New York Times, |anuar\ 15, 1911, p. SM 1 5. 9. According to l |redcrick| Newlin Price, “Lawson, of the ’Crushed Jewels,International Studio 78 (February 1924i, pp. '6 - 0, the first critic to describe Lawson’s palette w ith this phrase was James Gibbons Huneker. v Bruce Xt. John, ed„ John Sloan's New York Scene from the Dianes. Notes and Correspondence. /906-19/ ? New York: Harper Row Publishers, 1965), p. 216.

7.

Theodore Robinson Beacon Street, Boston (Beacon St., Boston, January, 1884), 1884

In Beacon Street, Boston, Robinson captured both the growth of a major city and the anonymity of modern urban life. I he workman watching the horses ignores the fashionably dressed woman walking alone down the broad sidewalk. The composition separates the space of work—the torn-up street—from the space of leisure—the sidewalk, where the woman strolls along the edge of Boston Common. The boundaries of the two spheres blur: the stones dumped by workmen spill onto the promenade, while the branches of a tree, exaggerated in length, extend across the canvas, bringing the benefits of nature into the city (without, inexplicably, casting shadows that would disrupt Robinson’s carefully structured composition). Robinson had probably returned to Boston to paint murals and architectural decorations in public buildings and private mansions. Such commissions had brought him to the city for short stints during each of the previous three years. Some of the artist’s friends based their careers on such decorative painting, but he viewed it merely as a much-needed source of income. Born in Irasburg, Vermont, Robinson grew up in Evansville, Wisconsin. He began his professional training in Chicago before going east in 1874 to study at the National Academy of Design. In the pattern typical of ambitious American art students in the 1870s, he continued his training in Paris, studying from 1876 to 1879 in the independent studio of Charles-Emile-Auguste Durand (Carolus-Duran) and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the history painter Jean-Leon Gerome. Although three Impressionist exhibitions were held during Robinson’s student years in Paris, his works of that period reveal no trace of their influence. After returning to New York, Robinson supported himself by teaching and decorative painting until he had saved enough money to return to France, which he did a few months after completing this painting. Io produce it, the artist set his easel on the sidewalk beside the black iron fence that then as now enclosed Boston Common. His vantage point encompassed a short stretch on either side of the intersection of Beacon and Joy Streets.' Just beyond, out of view, stands the Massachusetts State House, designed by Charles Bulfinch and built between 1795 and 1798. Not only did Robinson choose a position that concealed that imposing architectural landmark, he also placed a pile of construction rubble in the foreground of his composition. The draft horses and carts and the shovels propped against the fence offer further evidence of street repair in progress. Beacon Street forms the southern boundary of Beacon Hill, where in 1625 Boston’s first settler, the Reverend William Blaxton (or Blackstone), made his home. The section Robinson depicted was part of the eighteen acres of pasturage the Mount Vernon Proprietors purchased from the painter John Singleton Copley in 1 795 and developed into the city’s most prestigious neighborhood. Beacon Street, the oldest street on Beacon Hill, was home to the city’s social and cultural leaders, among them the celebrated physician, poet, and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. It was Holmes who first applied the term “Brahmins” to the city’s elite, whom he characterized as “the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy” with their “houses by Bulfinch, their monopoly of Beacon Street, their ancestral portraits and Chinese porcelains.” Some of the buildings in Robinson’s picture had historical significance. The two white houses, located at numbers 33 and 34 Beacon Street (just past the intersection with Joy Street), were erected in 1825 by the architect-builder Cornelius Coolidge. Number 33 was occupied from 1859 until his death in 1908 by George Francis Parkman, who lived there in seclusion after his father, an eminent physician and pioneer of humane treatment for the mentally ill, was murdered by a 1 larvard professor in one of the most highly publicized crimes of the nineteenth

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7. Theodore Robinson (lrasburg, Vermont 1852-1896 New York City) Beacon Street, Boston (Beacon St.. Boston, January, 1884), 1884

Oil on canvas, 17 x 21 in. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The F.lla Callup Sumner and Mary Carlin Sumner Collection Fund (1990.61)

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century. The next building, number 32, was the home of Susan B. and Joseph Sebastian Cabot, members of one of the most distinguished Boston Brahmin families. Beacon Street lost its preeminence in the decade after the Civil War, when some of its patrician residents relocated to the newly developed Back Bay. Reflecting an effort to upgrade the historic neighborhood, the short section of Beacon Street Robinson depicted was undergoing transformation in 1884. The red-brick building at the corner of Joy Street, just downhill from the white houses in Robinson’s painting, was demolished soon after he featured it in Ins streetscape and replaced by a taller one with a distinctive rippled facade, which stands there to this day. The building at the end of the Common, the Amory-Ticknor house designed by Charles Bulfinch in 1803-4, was altered sometime after 18852 SGL

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1. I am grateful to Karen Cord Iaylor, executive editor and publisher of The Beucnrt Hill Times, for identifying the site of Robinson’s painting. 2. This quotation from Holmes’s novel Elsie Vernier (1883) appears in Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston A to /. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 57. V Susan Southworth and Michael Sourhworth, The Boston Society of Architects' AIA Guide to Boston, 2nd ed. (Guilford, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press, 1942), pp. I S4-55. 4. Southworth, AIA Guide, pp. 150-51.

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The Countryside

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“The country is a good place to rest in, especially if one can control his surroundings. 1 he quiet, the calm, the peace, the pleasant color, the idyllic sights and sounds, all tend to allay nervous irritation, to tranquilize the soul, to repress the intellectual, and to invigorate the animal functions in a very remarkable degree. But this is not rustic life; it is only the country life of the city resident.”1 The social scientist who wrote that passage in 1895 recognized two opposing views of the countryside. On the one hand were city residents who viewed the country as a recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual resource. On the other were farmers who saw the land as an economic resource. For one group, the country was a place of leisure; for the other, a place of work. Uniting the two was the widely shared conviction that country life promoted morality through contact with nature, whereas the city fostered corruption. A pathologist summed up that belief in 1888: “Once let the human race be cut off from personal contact with the soil,” he warned, “once let the conventionalities and artificial restrictions of so-called civilization interfere with the healthful simplicity of nature, and decay is certain.”' The idealization of the farmer is deeply rooted in American culture. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1 “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever Fie had a chosen people."

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I hree-quarters

of a century later, Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the same conviction. “ 1 he farmer stands well on the world, FLmerson wrote. “He is a person whom a poet of any clime—Milton, Firdusi, or Cervantes—would appreciate as being really a piece of the old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow and flood; because he is, as all natural persons are, representative of Nature as much as these.”1 To be sure, idealization of the Farmer coexisted with condescension toward farmers. Some denigrated them as “clods,” identifying them with the soil they worked; others pitied them and their wives for lives of unremitting toil, meager income, and limited recreational opportunities. Even so, idealization of rural life intensified as young people fled the countryside for brighter possibilities in the cities. The percentage of the population engaged in agriculture declined steadily after the Civil War. In 1870, 53 percent of Americans worked in farming; by 1910, it had dropped to 31 percent.5 Numerous popular songs in the last quarter of the nineteenth century express the nostalgia of those who left their childhood home in the country for life in the city. In “Benny Come Back to the Earm” (1880) a mother pleads with her son to leave the temptations of urban life and return to the farm: Away from the home of your childhood you’ve gone To join in the world’s busy throng, And my heart aches to think that perhaps you’ll be borne, Into paths that are sinful and wrong. I miss you, my boy, and I want you to come. Away from all danger and harm. My pray’r is tonight as I silently kneel. Oh, Benny come back to the farm.6 The exodus from the countryside was most dramatic in New England, where rocky, hilly terrain made farming difficult. A spreading network of railroads enabled midwestern farmers, whose large, flat, fertile fields were perfectly suited to mechanization, to get their crops to New York and Boston as quickly as their competitors in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In New England, crop prices and land values plummeted. Farmers raised smaller crops or even abandoned the farm altogether as their children and other potential workers moved west to larger farms or to manufacturing towns or cities for more remunerative jobs. In a partial reversal of that exodus, after the Civil War affluent city dwellers began spending much of the year in the countryside, boarding in farmhouses and even buying them as summer retreats. In an address to the Connecticut Board of Agriculture in 1891, Florine Thayer McCray reported, “the busy merchants and financiers of our great cities go out of town with their families, earlier and earlier each year, and do not return until nearly

the first of December.” Recognizing that pattern as a shift on the part of those who had previously been “inclined to leave the farms and to desert and depreciate home life in the country,” she attributed the reverse migration to the therapeutic value of nature, noting that the city dwellers were turning “from their busy lives and the rasping friction of the world to the cool, refreshing regenerative contact with natural things.”" It was in that context that the American Impressionists painted their views of the countryside. Not raised on farms, the painters brought an urban perspective to country life. A critic remarked that for Childe Hassam the country was “nature’s playground.” In his annual summer forays from his New York apartment, Hassam sought outdoor recreation as well as artistic inspiration. Swimming was his preferred exercise, but he also found amusement in performing the routine chores of the country dweller, such as chopping wood. When his hostess at the Holley family’s boardinghouse in Cos Cob, Connecticut, Constant Holley MacRae, was offered a fallen tree to augment her meager fuel supply for the coming winter, she took advantage of that attitude. “Mr. Hassam is fine on the chop,” she wrote to her mother, “and we are all going over [to the cedar lot] with apples and saws and bring the tree home. Hot stuff! I pretend it is fun and they all think it is.”* 1 he countryside was also the setting for summer painting classes. Theodore Robinson took a group of students, mostly women, to Napanoch, New York, in 1894 and to Townshend, Vermont, in 1895. His response to the Vermont countryside exemplifies nostalgia for an idealized rural past. Ensconced in a rented farmhouse managed for him and his students by his female cousins, he enjoyed a spiritual homecoming to the region where his parents had grown up and he had been born. “(Ijt is like my own folks, cooking, ways, etc.,” he noted happily.1 He immersed himself in local-color literature, including Sarah Orne Jewett’s Old Town Folks, and enjoyed the dry wit of the local people. (One farmer claimed his land was so poor “he couldn’t even raise his voice on it.”11) J. Alden Weir was unusual among the American Impressionists in that he owned working farms. He acquired one, in Branchville, Connecticut, in exchange for a painting, and inherited the other, in Windham, Connecticut, from his in-laws. At both places, he threw himself into the life of a gentleman farmer. He reported on the activities at Branchville with evident delight, writing to his mother-in-law, “We have been living on game here lately, Saturday a hunter brought three partridges, a pair of quail and woodcock. ... I have had our cider made—six barrels and three quarters . . . sixty bushels of potatoes and barn full of grain.”12 Weir’s artwork was the farm’s major cash crop, but he also supervised the growing of hay, corn, oats, rye, and buckwheat. He attempted market gardening, raising celery and setting out six hundred raspberry bushes. By the time Weir acquired the Branchville property in 1882, it had been under cultivation for more than a century." Anthony Beers established a farm on the site about 1780. Expressing social aspirations beyond those of most farmers, Beers built a large two-story farmhouse in the fashionable Greek Revival style, surrounding it with ornamental plantings and a picket fence. When Weir took over the farm, the agricultural historian Jack Larkin observes, he “removed the formal picket fence around the dooryard because it was a rural expression of yearning toward urbanity” and “replaced it with rough palings that were an urbanite’s aspiration to rusticity.”M Weir invested in few of the labor-saving machines then readily available, continuing for years to cut and rake hay with hand tools. He also persisted in using oxen as draft animals when most farmers had replaced them with horses. Although Weir aimed to make the farm self-supporting, he did not depend on it for his income. Instead, it was a vacation home for him, his family, and their guests. A letter from a former student describes the painter at Branchville: “How he enjoyed clearing vistas, trimming trees well up from the ground revealing beautiful notes and things unseen before. I he making of level places for tennis, working with his men who used great red oxen to haul the boulders to one side; the building of the pond with prize money . . . ; piling brush here and there and making a bon-fire now and then when the boy in him suggested it."1

I his account describes a person making a

country retreat, enhancing the landscape’s aesthetic and recreational possibilities, and delighting in the process.

Like Hassam in Cos Cob and other city folk vacationing on farms and in fishing villages, Weir and his friends did for play what the locals did for work. Harvesting ranked with fishing and hunting as a recreation. I he artist Robert Blum wrote to Weir’s wife after he visited Branchville in July 1888, “1 have recovered from the fatigues of Hay Raking and my blisters have subsided.”1'' Weir could enjoy swinging a scythe with his farmhands (who undoubtedly would have preferred a mechanical reaper), but when his muscles ached he was free to stop and go fishing. Weir’s Branchville property mirrored social transformations in other ways as well. It was not a family farm, handed down through the generations by those who lived on the land year-round and depended on it for their income, but one worked by a tenant farmer for a city-based owner. The United States census reported tenancy rates for the first time in 1880; in that year, 25 percent of American farms were operated by farmers who did not own them; by 1900, the figure had risen to 35 percent.1’ As native-born, predominantly Anglo-Saxon farmworkers left New England, they were replaced by immigrants willing to accept more limited returns for their labor. Weir’s farm was at different times under the care of a Dutchman, a Scotsman, and an Alsatian. The latter, Paul Remy, worked the farm from about 1890 to about 1907, living in a house on the property along with his wife and two sons, all of whom participated in the work of the farm.1* Remy occasionally posed for Weir. He is probably one of the figures in The Ice Cutters (cat. 16) and the man in Ploughing for Buckwheat (cat. 17). As America became increasingly urban, its leading painters and their patrons expressed their attachment to an agricultural past. Weir, Robinson, Metcalf, and other American Impressionists found inspiration in the cyclical activities of the rural calendar. From spring planting through winter’s ice harvest, the countryside inspired images of a rapidly vanishing way of life.

8.

Ernest Lawson Potato Diggers

I awson’s Potato Diggers crosses genres and styles. Painted with Impressionist brushstrokes, it depicts rural labor with an Ashcan sensibility. Digging potatoes is heavy and tedious W( >rk, and Lawson makes no attempt in his picture to romanticize it, or to use Impressionist technique to gloss over harsh reality. I.awson’s Impressionism here serves to focus the viewer on the task at hand. Objects in the background arc indistinct to the point of being impossible

to identify securely. The horizon line is rimmed by vague shapes, perhaps indicating a small village. There is a nondescript dilapidated farm building at the left. Much easier to read is the figure of the worker in the foreground who bends over to lift a basket full of potatoes. His posture is weary; he seems rooted to the ground, like the crop he harvests. A second potato digger stands behind, while a third figure, presumably loading potatoes, bends over a wagon hitched to a team of horses. Lawson offers a view of the horses’ rumps, passing up the opportunity to paint equestrian grace or motion. The farmland, too, seems marginal. The potato patch is just that, a small area set on a hill that slopes off behind the weathered shed in the center of the picture. Unlike the French Impressionists who utilized their technique to flatten and even out landscapes to suggest calm and serenity, Lawson’s focus on steep hills and deep inclines promises no tranquility. The hilly terrain in the background is repeated in the foreground by the deep furrows created by the harvesting of the crop, creating a sort of mini-glaciated landscape. The artist offers no secure foothold for laborer or viewer in the disturbed soil. Under a gray autumnal sky, unkempt green and yellow grasses share the hills with bald patches and dark areas that may indicate rocky outcroppings. Although Lawson made his reputation with shimmering, high-key Manhattan cityscapes, he also painted rural landscapes throughout his career. In addition, a small group of Lawson canvases, of which Potato Diggers is one, can be characterized as figure paintings, or figure-inthe-landscape works. Lawson spent 1893 in Paris, studying at the Academie Julian with JeanPaul Laurens, a history painter, and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, a portraitist and painter of Orientalist works. Exposure to those academic figure painters seems to have had minimal impact on Lawson’s future course, but he did learn from them to paint the figure, should he choose. He did not often choose. The subject of Potato Diggers is rural labor. A similar canvas by Lawson, Snow Crop (Southern Snow) (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Collection), shows cotton harvesters working in a field. Lawson also painted Ploughing, an image of a farmer walking behind a horse and plow, and a canvas called Woman in a Cornfield (location unknown). Fishermen (1911), depicting a different type of labor, is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is difficult to date Lawson’s pictures. With the exception of his work in Florida, beginning in 1931, there is little in style or subject that points to secure dates absent an exhibition history or a history of acquisition from the artist. Potatoes are a hardy crop, growing in a variety of climates and soils. Lawson could have painted these diggers in Connecticut, New Jersey, or Long Island, or on Nova Scotia, to which he occasionally returned. AKN

86

8. Ernest Lawson

(Halifax, Nova Scotia 1873-193” Miami Beach, Florida) PotJto Diggers

Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. The Douglass Collection

87

9. Willard Metcalf The Village in Late Spring, 1920

In the winter of 1903-4 Willard Metcalf became a born-again artist. Drinking heavily, out of money, and with his personal life in turmoil, he retreated to his parents’ farmhouse in Walpole, Maine, on the Damariscotta Peninsula. There he determined to give up portraiture, illustration, and decoration and instead paint the New England countryside. "The city fell away from him, to be replaced by the prevalent belief that virtue lay in country mores and values.”1 2 * Metcalf called h is turning point a "renaissance,” and indeed, in the bracing air and bright winter sunshine, the artist found his calling. In 1925 Walter Jack Duncan wrote that Metcalf was “the poet laureate of the New England Hills.”' A restless striver, Metcalf devoted himself from 1904 until his death in 1925 to painting the New England landscape in every season. He never settled in one spot but planted his easel and wielded his brush—spring, summer, winter, and fall—in the hills and valleys, fields and coastlines of Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. This body of work, painted in an Impressionist stvle, with bright colors and broken brushstrokes, proved the making of Metcalf’s enduring reputation. The Village in Late Spring has been identified as a view of Woodbury, Connecticut, where Metcalf worked in the spring, early summer, and fall of 1919.; Woodbury, settled in 1672 on the Pomperaug River in Litchfield County, is eight miles west of Waterbury. The town motto, " I he essence of New England,” reflects the eighteenth-century houses and churches that give the place its character. Suburban now, in 1919 Woodbury offered a fine setting for iconicrenderings of small-town New England life. Metcalf was especially drawn to the turn of the seasons.4 On this canvas, the light greens of spring have begun to deepen, while the first buds give way to leaves and flowers. In the foreground, a couple cultivates a garden just outside a small village. Behind them is a cluster of houses set in a gentle valley amid sloping, tree-lined hills. Here is an American arcadia, a glorification of the pleasant labor of making things grow. In 1909 a critic noted that “Metcalf’s eyes . . . are those of an optimist, an idealist. He is never sordid, too real; he searches only for nature’s radiant aspects.”5 If Metcalf offered emotional sustenance to patrons and critics with the images he created, he painted most of all to steady and succor himself. When Metcalf painted The Village in Late Spring in 1920, his marriage to Henriette McCrea, his second wife and the mother of his two children, was foundering, much to his dismay. Metcalf’s pictures are painted assurances that amid change, all will be well. In 1922 the artist wrote to his ten-year-old daughter, Rosalind, “I want to paint the springtime. . . . with the beautiful hills and dancing singing brooks—And the birds all singing and everything just bubbling over with gladness. ... It is so full of promise and makes me feel always, as tho youth had returned, not only to all nature but to me as well.”" AKN

1. Klizaheth deVeer, "The ! afe,” in deVeer and Richard Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow: The Art and Life of Willard l. Metcalf (New York: Abbeville Press, 198"), pp. 6X-69. 2. Walter Jack Duncan, Paintings hy Willard unpaged.

Metcalf. e\h. cat. (Washington, D.C.: The Corcoran (.alien of An, |92s>,

’■ Date and locanon according to Francis Murphy, W illard l.troy Metcalf: A Retrospective, e\h. cat. (Springfield, Mass.: Museum of Fine Ans, 1977), p. cat. 44. 4. Barbara |. NlacAdam, W inter's Promise: W illard Metcalf m Cornish. Sew Hampshire, 1909-1920, e\h. cat. (Fbnovet, N.H.: Hood Museum of An, Dartmouth College, 1999), p, 33. 5. Quoted from Sen York American* January 19, 1909 in Bruce W. Chambers, ~\\ illard L Metcalf: A Partial History of the Renaissance, in \\ tliirj Mcualf ilSsS—Yankee Impressionist* exh. cat. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2003), p. 30. b. Quoted in deVeer and Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow, p. 144.

9. Willard Metcalf (Lowell, Massachusetts lSs.X-192s New V>rk City) The Villjge m I Jle Spring, 1920 Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 \ O 1/2 in. Kennedy Galleries Inc., New V>rk

89

io. Willard Metcalf Hauling Wood—February, 1920

Willard Metcalf, Yankee born and bred, was, in his time, the reigning master of the New Kngland winter. An amateur naturalist and avid fisherman who tied his own flies, Metcalf was devoted to plein-air painting, even in the snow.1 He painted winter as early as 1888, when he was a journeyman-artist in France, but did not continue with the subject on his return home in 1889, partly because it was the special purview of his friend, John H. Twachtman. Metcalf and Twachtman were founding members in 1897 of the group called Ten American Artists and remained close colleagues until Twachtman’s premature death in 1902. Metcalf returned to winter subjects at Christmastime of 1906, when he visited his parents in Maine. He exhibited those Maine winter scenes in 1908 at an exhibition at the Montross Gallery, New York, where they were well received critically and—no mean consideration—found buyers. Cornish, New Hampshire, became the artist’s favorite winter location beginning in 1909. This destination was the name given to an area that included a number of nearby small towns, including Cornish, Plainfield, and nearby Windsor, Vermont. The sculptor Augustus SaintGaudens had arrived in Cornish in 1885, the avant-garde of w-hat became a small and very sociable artists’ colony. Metcalf visited Cornish in 1909, 1911, 1917, and 1920, not so much for the company (though he usually stayed with friends) as for the peaceful beauty of the off-season scenery. In the w'inter of 1911 Metcalf chose Cornish for an extended honeymoon with his young wife, Henriette. Metcalf’s Cornish scenes are generally pure landscape, without figures, reflecting his appreciation of the pristine countryside. A critic writing for the New York Tribune, reviewing a show of Metcalf’s pictures at Milch Gallery in 1920, wrote that the artist has “over and over again . . . interpreted the beauty of the New England winter . . . making veracious things haunting. In the study of winter he would appear to have achieved his special metier.”2 Metcalf painted Hauling Wood—February during his last visit to Cornish, in 1920. Atypically, he included in the landscape a vignette of men working outdoors. At dusk on a snowy evening, two men load logs from a large woodpile onto a cart drawn by a team of horses. A nearby house sits in a clearing amid hills dotted with evergreen trees. The woodpile is on the same property as the house, whose plot is bordered by a log fence. Outdoor activity in winter was associated with healthfulness, stamina, and virility. The work of hauling logs appealed to New England nostalgia. In 1907 a reviewer of Metcalf’s winter pictures linked snow-capped evergreens to “good old Yankee land, where just around the corner the sleigh has dropped a jolly party at the barn, while from the house there is a smell of logs, mingled with the psychical odor of pie. New Fingland pie, Maine pie the pie that mother made.” Hauling Wood—February evokes this slice of New England folk memory. The labor is strenuous but invigorating, and in Metcalf’s snowy world, it will be rewarded by warmth, shelter, and home comforts. AKN

1. Barbara J. MacAdam, Winter's Promise: Willard Metcalf in Cornish. New Hampshire, 1909—1920, exh. cat. (Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1999), 2. "Mr. Metcalf’s Nets 1 andscapes,” New York Tribune, 21 March 1920, quitted in MacAdam, Winter’s Promise, p. 22 n. 73. v “Around the Galleries,

", quoted in MacAdam,

\ete York Sun, 5 April 190

Winter's Promise, p. 29 n. 21.

10. Willard Metcalf (Lowell, Massachusetts 1858— 1925 New York City) Hjuling Wood—February, 1920 Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. Gift of anonymous donor (1951.111

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i i. Edward Henry Potthast Boy Sharpening a Sickle, c. 1887-92

Potthast was a product of the extraordinary art community that flourished in Cincinnati in the nineteenth century. Born to German-American artisan parents—his father was a cabinetmaker, his mother a milliner—he was a friend of fellow Cincinnatians Frank Duveneck, John H. Twachtman, Joseph DeCamp, and Robert Blum. Potthast spent twelve years pursuing art instruction at night at the McMicken School of Design while working as a lithographer. By 1882 he had saved enough money to go to Antwerp and then Munich, where he studied for three years. He returned to Cincinnati and to lithography, resuming evening study this time at the school of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Potthast made a second trip to Europe between 1887 and 1891, going to France, where he painted at Barbizon, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, and was touched by French Impressionism absorbed through the mediating influence of the American painter Robert Vonnoh. He returned briefly to Cincinnati before settling permanently in New York in 1896. Boy Sharpening a Sickle (this is a modern, descriptive title) is likely a product of Potthast’s second trip to Europe. He did not date his canvases, and clues for dates must be deduced from exhibition history, style, and subject matter. Existing pictures indicate that sometime during his four years in France, Potthast traveled to Brittany and Holland. In 1889 he exhibited two versions of A Breton Girl, one at the Paris Salon and one at the Exposition Universelle, also in Paris. The Salon picture, Study: A Britany Isicl Girl, is also called Sunshine (fig. 53). The Exposition canvas, Une Britonne [sic], is in a private collection.' Potthast returned home with both versions of A Breton Girl, exhibiting them in Cincinnati. In 1894 he was the only American included in a show at the Cincinnati Art Museum of “Light Pictures,” that is, those designed “to better show the differences between modern paintings which deal primarily with problems of light, and those painted in the older manner of the French, the Munich and the Dusseldorf Schools.”1 2 To that exhibition Potthast sent A Breton Girl, which is a sun-drenched picture, and another oil called Sunshine and Shadow. We have only a title for Sunshine and Shadow with no corresponding image, but, based on style and subject, it is possible that the present Boy Sharpening a Sickle might have been Sunshine and Shadow. When Potthast moved to New York in 1897, he obtained freelance work as a lithographer for Scribner's and Century magazines before finally trusting his livelihood to fine art after the turn of the century. Potthast prospered in New York, settling in at the Gainsborough Building at 222 West Fifty-ninth Street, where he remained until his death. A sociable man, he took an active part in the city ’s professional art milieu and saw his work acknowledged with awards and prizes. A lifelong bachelor, he specialized in lighthearted pictures of men, women, and children enjoying summer recreations. Potthast is best known today for brightly colored beach scenes of seaside resorts along the Atlantic coast from Coney Island, Brooklyn, to Monhegan Island, Maine. His mature style was a comfortable and personal adaptation of Impressionist painting techniques and bright palette. Potthast never engaged in the self-promotion that would have gained him greater recognition during his lifetime. Since his death his reputation has steadily grown, as collectors and institutions have come to appreciate his happy images executed in a distinctive and American Impressionist idiom. A consideration of Potthast’s oeuvre reveals his broad range. He painted figural studies, genre scenes, landscapes, cityscapes, and coastal views in a variety of stvles that reflect his Munich training and exposure to Barbizon painting, as well as the influence of the French Impressionists and the contemporaneous Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. AKN

Pig- 53. P’dward Henry Potthast (American, 1857-192"*) Sunshine, 1889 Oil on canvas, 31 1/16 x 25 5/8 in.

C incinnati Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Lari! Anderson (1927.4)

1. Annette Blaugrund, Pans 188V: American Artists at the Universal Exposition, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 19891, pp. 199, 289. Also Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Sineteenth-Century Pans Salons Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990), p. 582. 2. The 1894 exhibition is described in John Wilson, Edward Henry Potthast: American Impressionist, exh. cat. New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 1998), p. 12.

11. Edward Henry Potthast (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1857—1927 New York City) Hoy Sharpening a Sickle, c. I 887-92 Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in. Collection Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Davies

93

12. T heodore Robinson Scene at Giverny (formerly Normandy Farm and Farm House and Rick), 1890

From 1884 ro 1892 Robinson divided his time between Europe and America, spending the warmer months in France and usually returning to New York in the winter. At first, he made Paris bis base, making occasional excursions to other sites including Barbizon, Dieppe, and Holland. In 1885 he was one of the first American artists to visit Giverny, the village in Normandy where Claude Monet had settled two years earlier.1 2 3 Robinson spent half of each year from 1888 to 1892 in Giverny. Although Monet generally stayed aloof from the art colony that formed in his adopted village, he befriended Robinson, whose diary records frequent visits to the French artist’s studio and meals at his home, sometimes in company with other guests including Camille Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte. Stylistically, Monet was a major influence on the younger American, prompting him to lighten his palette, loosen his brushwork, and capture the changing light and atmosphere by working in series. Thematically, however, the two artists differ significantly: Robinson retained a predilection for themes from workaday life, whereas the French master generally chose subjects denoting bourgeois leisure. That situation changed somewhat in the late 1880s, when Monet devoted a few canvases to grainstacks set within an expansive landscape, and more definitively in 1890, when he produced his major grainstacks series. In more than a dozen canvases, Monet captured the stacks’ rounded forms in varied light and atmospheric conditions. Inspired by Monet, several of the American artists in Giverny produced their own grainstack paintings; John Leslie Breck, Theodore Butler, Lilia Cabot Perry, and Robinson all essayed the theme. Unlike Monet, who monumentalized grainstacks against a sketchily rendered background, Robinson delineated the farm compound and further suggested human presence through the ladder propped against the stack and the wagon at its base. His painting perfectly matches a contemporary’s description of Giverny’s working landscape: “The houses are of stone, stuccocovered, and since the town is preeminently a farming town—and since in France, by a custom that dates from the turbulent Middle Ages, farmers live in the security of the town and drive daily out to work in their fields—most houses have a kind of walled barnyard, with a grange and poultry shed, all forming part of the property.”rhe buildings in the background of Robinson’s painting probably include Monet’s house; the farmyard he depicted is the one in which Monet painted his grainstack series. Robinson portrayed the same farm from different viewpoints in two earlier paintings, Farm among Hills (c. 1885, private collection) and Giverny (1887, private collection). Emulating Monet’s serial practice, Robinson produced two versions of Scene at Giverny. In the Detroit painting, the harsh glare of midday sun flattens forms and bleaches color from the landscape and buildings. The light and shadow of the foreground are rendered in complementary yellow and violet. In contrast, a larger version, A Farm House in Giverny (c. 1890, private collection) captures the deeper tones of a slightly more overcast day.’ SGI.

94

1. Set Sona Johnston, In Monet's Light: Theodore Robinson in Giverny, txh. cat. (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2004). 2. Pierre Toulgouat, “Skylights in Normandy," Holiday 4 (August 1^48), p. 68, quoted in Johnston, In Monet's Light, p. 53. 3. Giverny and .4 Farm House in Giverny are illustrated in Johnston, In Monet's Light, pp. 81 and 95 respectively.

12. Theodore Robinson (Irasburn, Vermont 1852-1896 New York City) Scene at Gweeny (formerly Normandy harm and harm House and Rick), 1890 Oil on canvas, 16 x 25 3/4 in. The Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of Mrs. Christian H. Hecker (70.680)

95

Theodore Robinson 13. On the Tow-path - A Halt, 1893 14. Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal, 1893

Robinson returned to New York from Ciiverny in December 1X92. Although he did not realize it at the time, he would never return to Europe. Instead, during the three and a half years left to him, he spent summers painting in the countryside of New York and New England. I le began the summer of 1893 in Greenwich, boarding with a fellow Giverny artist, Henry bitch Taylor, at a farmhouse on Round Hill Road across from Twachtman’s house. On July 10, Robinson traveled to Napanoch, New York, where he taught a summer class under the auspices of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. After the students left, he stayed on until October 30 to paint. Napanoch had been selected as the site of the summer class because of its setting in a valley of the Shawangunk mountains near the Delaware and Hudson Canal, a commercial waterway that linked the two rivers. Constructed between 1825 and 1828 to transport coal from the Pennsylvania mines to Philadelphia, New York, and New England, the 108-mile 108-lock canal was America’s first million-dollar private enterprise. Drawn by horses or mules, the canal boats glided past farms and rural hamlets. Entire families lived on the boats, the women and children working fifteen- to twenty-hour days alongside the men, as well as doing all their cooking and laundry within the vessels’ narrow confines.' In his diary entry of July 12, 1893, Robinson noted his pleasure in the surroundings. “Took a long walk along the canal to Ellenville and return,” he wrote. “Some pretty things. Amazing, the canal boat life, mules with red ear-covers, a little girl sitting sideways on one (the off one) some colored crews, man, wife and children. They get thro’ the locks in quick time and there are more boats than 1 supposed, a constant succession of them. Interesting, the reflection of boats and Shawangunk, above, and distant landscapes and mountains.” Despite “an atmosphere of profanity and bad language” Robinson observed along the towpath because of the mule drivers’ swearing at their animals, his students, all women, gathered there to paint. A journalist described the scene: “the towpath bristles with white umbrellas all day like a field with mushrooms after a fog. Parties board the boats and are towed from one lock to another. The canal men are kindly interested in the progress of art and aid it when they can pointing out ‘the fresh greens’ and ‘tender purples’ within sight. This artistic vernacular has become so common that the very drivers stop their horses to point out ‘pretty bits’ to the aspirants for artistic glory.”2 Robinson’s fascination with the “amazing . . . canal boat life” resulted in an important group of paintings. l ike the English painter John Constable, who recorded workaday activities around the locks on the River Stour in such paintings as hlatford Mill (fig. 54), Robinson depicted the waterway from various viewpoints, producing both panoramic and close-up views of the working landscape. On the Tow-path—A Halt ignores the canal itself, just out of view to the left, to present the view seen by a boat passenger. A young boy driving a team of tow horses looks back for instructions from the captain, probably his father. The painting exemplifies Robinson’s deft combination of academic draftsmanship and Impressionist brushwork. The horses are solidly modeled, but light touches of the brush delineate the mountainside and the trees along the canal. With

t ip. 54. John Constable (Knglish, 1776-1837)

Opposite: Fig. 55. F’dward l.amson Henry

hlatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River), 1816-17

(American, 1841-1919)

Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in.

On the Towpath, 1891

Tate Gallery, London

Oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 26 1/4 in. Private Collection, courtesy of Sotheby's

the Impressionist’s visual realism, Robinson conveys the glare of sunlight and the pleasing pattern of purple shadows. Just two years earlier, Edward I.amson Henry had painted a similar scene. Henry’s On the Towpath (fig. 55) also shows a child at work but, painted in an earlier genre tradition, edges toward sentiment that Robinson refuses. As she walks along the towpath, the barefoot girl plucks a daisy (loves-me, lovesme-not). The knobby-kneed mules, their long ears accentuated by red covers, toss their heads to get the last grain from their feed baskets. Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal presents a panoramic view of the area around Lock 26 at Port Benjamin (now Wawarsing). A cluster of boatyards, dry docks, stores, and a hotel served the boat crews and local residents, but the area remained primarily agricultural. Robinson set his easel on a bridge to obtain a high viewpoint over the waterway, the surrounding buildings, and, in the distance a lock and a red iron bridge. The flat, working landscape and expansive sky evoke the paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch artists whom Robinson greatly admired (see fig. 29). Pursuing the serial practice he had adopted in Giverny under the influence of Monet, Robinson produced three views of this scene, depicting it under different light conditions.1 2 3 4 5 This version records the muted light of an overcast day, a condition whose subtleties Robinson frequently preferred to full sunlight. He registered his intentions for the canvas in his diary entry of September 15, 1893: “worked on grey day, but trying to keep my first impression—very luminous sky and water—difficult as there are many kinds of greyness.” Under the title Port Ben, Gray Day, Robinson consigned the painting to Macbeth Gallery between 1893 and 1896.'' During Robinson’s stay at Napanoch, a drought delayed or prevented navigation on the canal for as long as a week at a time. Such dependence on the vagaries of the weather, added to the greater convenience and reliability of the expanding railroad network, hastened the demise of the Delaware and Hudson Canal. It ceased operation just five years after Robinson painted along the towpath. SGL

1. Paula Valentine, "Barges, Railroads and Bridges: A Short History of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, 1828-1898,” http://minisink.org/delhud.html, accessed April 21, 2005. 2. “Women and Their Interests,” unidentified newspaper clipping, quoted in Sona Johnston, Theodore Robinson.

1852-1896, exh. cat. (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 19"3), p. xxiii. 3. The other versions, both also titled Port Ben. Delaware and Hudson Canal, are in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a private collection. 4. The painting is no. 184 in John I. H. Baur, Theodore Robinson, exh. cat. (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 194f>i, reprinted in Baur, Three Nineteenth Century American Painters (New 3ork: Arno Press, I969i, p. to Sona Johnston for confirming that the Sheldon’s painting is Baur no. 184.

■>. I am grateful

97

98

13. Theodore Robinson < Irasburg, Vermont 1852-1896 New York City) On the Tow-path—A Halt, 1893 Oil on canvas, 28 x 40 in. Art Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke, Viriginia. Acquired with bunds provided by I he Horace («. bralin Charitable Trust (2002.003)

14. Theodore Robinson (Irasburp, Vermont 1852-1896 New York City) Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal, 1893 Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 22 1/4 in. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NAA-Nelle Cochrane Woods Memorial

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15. Theodore Robinson Oxen Ploughing (Springtime, Vermont), 1895

Partly at the urging of the critic Hamlin Garland, who insisted that an artist could truly portray only the place of his birth, Robinson spent the summer of 1895 in Townshend, Vermont. His actual birthplace, Irasburg, was in the far north of the state about 160 miles away, but his parents had grown up near Townshend in southern Vermont and he still had relatives there. He arrived with a female entourage: the art students he would teach and his cousins, Agnes Cheney and her daughters Alice and Helen, who would manage the household for all of them. On his first full day in Vermont Robinson noted in his diary, “I took a snap-shot of our neighbor Elliott Morse, ploughing with oxen.”1 That photograph became the basis of this painting. Robinson’s use of photographs as preliminary studies was by no means unusual. Winslow Homer, Thomas Hakins, Paul Cezanne, and Paul Gauguin are among the many artists of the period who occasionally employed them. Although the use of the camera might seem at odds with the plein-air painting and spontaneity associated with Impressionism, it enabled Robinson to capture the moment. “Painting direct from nature is difficult, as things do not remain the same, the camera helps to retain the picture in your mind,” he explained in a letter from France.2 After taking the photograph, Robinson painted the canvas in the open air, being careful to work at the same hour and under the same light conditions he had captured on film. In Oxen Ploughing the strong sunlight on the animals’ backs and the short shadows beneath them indicate that he had chosen a time near midday. He retained the blurring that resulted from the camera’s long exposure time, exploiting it to convey motion. The photograph also enabled him to fix the fleeting impression of the orchard in full bloom. “Summer all of a sudden,” he noted on May 25; “blossoms almost gone. They are the devil to paint—tho’ they have lasted a long time this year, and were uncommon fine.” The artist rendered the blossoming fruit trees as a tapestry of pink, violet, green, and white, dissolving form in a flurry of brushstrokes. He may have enjoyed the contrast of the delicate blossoms and the powerful animals. Oxen were old-fashioned by 1890, the last year the U.S. Census recorded their numbers. They persisted as an ordinary element of farm life only in parts of Vermont. Robinson lingered in Vermont until November 21, painting the local landscape and women doing domestic chores. He died the following spring at Agnes Cheney's New York apartment of the asthma that had plagued him since childhood. SGL

lOO

1. Robinson’s diary, Townshend, Vt„ May 17, 1X95, Frick Art Reference 1 ibrary. New York. 2. Quoted in John I. H. Baur, "Photographic Studies by an Impressionist,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 50 (October-December I94h), p. Ml. Baur does not identify the recipient or date of the letter. For more on Robinson’s use of photography, see Stephanie Mayer, hirst h xposure: The Sketchbooks and Photographs of Theodore Robinson (Givernv, France: Musee d’Art Americain Giverny, 2000). V Jack 1 arkin. The Weir harm: Working Agriculture and the Vision of Rural Life in Sew hngland, J#60-/940 (Wilton, Conn.: National Park Service Cultural 1 andscapc Report, 1996), p. 51.

15. Theodore Robinson (Irasburg, Vermont 1852-1896 New York City) Oxen Ploughing (Springtime. VermontI, 1895 Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 in. The Douglass Collection

ioi

16. J. Aider) Weir The Ice C utters (Cutting Ice) 1895

Weir grew up in a family of painters. His father, the history painter Robert W. Weir, served for years as the drawing instructor at West Point. His older half brother John Ferguson Weir won renown for two great industrial paintings (see figs. 15 and 16) before subordinating his own artistic career to his role as the first director of the Yale School of Fine Arts. J. Alden Weir received his earliest instruction from his father. He studied for three years at the National Academy of Design before sailing for Paris, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the Salon favorite Jean-Leon Gerome. Traveling to Holland and Spain, he developed an appreciation for the work of the seventeenth-century painters Frans Hals and Diego Velazquez. During summer holidays, he visited various art colonies, including Barbizon, the home of Jean-Fran^ois Millet. On his return to New York in 1877, Weir took a leading role among the young European-trained artists, participating in arts organizations including the Society of American Artists and teaching. Beginning in the late 1880s, he adopted the looser brushwork and brighter colors of Impressionism under the influence of his close friends John H. Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. In this unusual variation of the Impressionist winter landscape, Weir treated an old-fashioned subject in a modern manner. By 1895, when he depicted workers cutting ice from a pond on his farm in Branchville, Connecticut, that backbreaking and dangerous chore had disappeared from most farmers’ winter calendar. The Massachusetts entrepreneur Frederic Tudor had begun exporting ice to the tropics in 1806. Within fifty years, large commercial icehouses in the northeastern United States shipped ice to India, Hong Kong, and South America. At home, steady improvements in the technology of harvesting and storing ice made it available year-round, especially after iceboxes became standard in middle-class kitchens in the 1840s.1 An aura of nostalgia clung to small-scale ice harvesting by 1864, when Currier Ives published the lithograph Winter in the Country: Getting Ice, after George Henry Durrie’s painting of the same title (fig. 56). Catering to the popular taste for images of vanishing rural folkways, Durrie filled his scene with detail: skaters glide across the pond, a dog lies on a discarded coat, and tall trees reach clawlike branches into the overcast sky. The cluster of four men recalls that ice harvesting, like cornhusking and barn raising, was usually a community effort.2 3 4 The workers in Durrie’s image use none of the specialized tools then widely available. Instead, one hacks a jagged hole in the frozen pond with an axe. Weir’s ice cutters employ a more systematic if still low-tech method. They have scraped the snow from glassy squares of the pond and scored grooves in one section before using special saws to cut the blocks free. They have performed these steps by hand, however, rather than using the horse-drawn machinery that made quicker work of the job. Ice cutting was just one of the farmer’s winter chores that Durrie depicted in paint and Currier & Ives distributed to a wide audience.' Weir, too, demonstrated his interest in seasonal tasks by painting a companion picture, Loading Ice (1894, art market). Although Weir's subject matter and fondness for the old ways link him to Durrie, he used the material in a modern manner. He left more than half of his composition “empty,” exploring the varied colors and textures of the ice and snow, and indicated the figures and trees with quick, summary brushstrokes. Both Weir and Durrie were city-based artists, portraying rural life for nostalgic urban patrons. Country people did not share the artists' regret at the obsolescence of such chores as cutting ice. “Looking back I cannot see any romantic side to the ice harvest,” a man who grew up on a farm in upstate New York recalled. “It was just cold, hard work, that was necessary to protect milk and food during the hot summer months. . . . The ice harvest. . . has gone but it is one industry that is not missed.”'1 SGL.

Fig. 56. Winter in the Country: Getting lee l ithogrjph published by Currier & Ives, INh4 | Alter a painting of the same title by George Henry Durrie, IX62| Museum of the City of New York, 1 he Harry I. Peters Collection (58.300.94.)

1. John Steel Gordon, An hnfnre of Wealth: rhe Epic History of American Economic Power (New York: HarpcrCollins, 2004i, pp. 176-79. 2. Joseph C. Jones Jr., America's Icemen: An lllustratire History of the United States Natural Ice Industry, /f>6 5-J9Jt Humble, lex.: Jobeco Books, 19X4 i, p. 15. 3. See Martha Young Hutson, George Henry Durrie (1820-1863): American Winter Landscapist, Renowned through Currier and Ires, exh. cat. i Santa Barbara. I aht.: Santa Barbara Museum of An, 197’ i. 4. George W. Walter, “The Ice Harvest," quoted in Jones, America's Icemen, p. 20.

16. J. Alden Weir (West Point, New York 1852-1919 New York City) The Ice Cutters (Cutting Ice), 1895 Oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 24 1/8 in. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregorf. Gilt of Alfred H. and Nancy de C. Corbett in memory of Mrs. Gretchen H. Corbett

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17. J. Alden Weir Ploughing for Buckwheat (New England Ploughman), 1898 (retouched c. 1912)

In August 1898 Weir wrote to his friend Charles Krskine Scott Wood, I have just finished a rather large canvas which I hope you will see. It is a New England farmer and if I can get another week of sunlight I can complete it. I have had it on hand for two years and [it] is pretty well considered, but these large canvasses take ten times the time a small canvas does and are ten times as interesting but frame bills and disposing of them are against them. This one I have down for my Ex. with the Ten, as a center canvas to build about. You know this little Ex. which I refer to the pictures are hung in groups each artist's work by itself.1 2 * The Ten, officially designated Ten American Painters, mounted their first exhibition in the spring of 1898. Midday Rest in New England (fig. 57) garnered the most praise of Weir’s paintings in that groundbreaking show. Building on its success, Weir sent another large painting that included oxen to the Ten’s second exhibition, held at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York in April 1899. Again, the critics singled out his image of old-fashioned agrarian labor as the highlight of his display. Referring to the painting by the title Weir first gave it, the New York Times critic wrote, “By far the best of his present examples is the ‘New England Plowman.’ The subject is a Millet one, a team of oxen, a child, and a man placed in a simple, almost conventional landscape. There is a soberness of coloring, an atmosphere perhaps a little too dry, but the strength of the drawing, and the feeling of the composition overcome these.” Weir's original title, New England Ploughman, positioned the subject as an archetype. He reinforced that reading by adopting the elongated vertical format of the stained-glass windows in the churches where he worshiped and the early Italian paintings he so admired, eliminating any individualizing features from the man’s face, and including the enigmaticchild, as androgynous as an angel. The runic arrangement of stones encloses the child in a shadowy dream realm, set off from the sun-drenched world of work. Weir’s esteem for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes fostered his allegorical bent. During a stay in Paris in 1889, Weir purchased one of the French painter’s works and persuaded him to undertake the murals in the recently completed Boston Public Library. Weir borrowed Puvis’s large scale, matte finish, grayed palette, and classicizing devices for such canvases as In the Dooryard (c. 1894, private collection).4 Such influences apart, Weir and his circle were predisposed to assign symbolic meaning to aspects of rural life. When he sent his preliminary drawings for the dome of a building at the World's Columbian Exposition to John Ferguson Weir, his brother compared the artistic challenge facing the younger Weir to that of his overseer at Branchville, advising him in biblical tones, “You must shy over the rocks like Paul at his plow drawn by two mighty oxen, who upturn huge boulders in the furrows.” Sensing such allusions in the painting, the critic and collector Duncan Phillips called it “that epic picture of the American farmer amid soil and sky.”'SGL

I 04

Fig. 57. J. Alden Weir

1. |. Alden Weir to Charles F.rskine Scott Wood, August 5, 1898; typescript,

(American, 1852-1919)

Weir Farm National Historic Site, W ilton, Conn., The Dorothy Weir Young

Mi J Jay Rest in New England, 1897

Scrapbook C ollection, WF'FA 2891, box 2, folder 2.

Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 50 .1/8 in.

2. "The Ten American Painters," The New York Times, April 8, 1899,

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine

Saturday supplement, p. 240.

Arts, Philadelphia. Cntt of Isaac H.

1. Dorothy Weir Young, The I ife and Letters of J. Alden Weir 119f>0;

C luthier, Fdward H. C oates. Dr. Francis

reprint, Ness York: Kennedy Ciraphicx and Da Capo Press, |9"l,,

Vi. I ess is. Robert C. Ogden and |oseph

pp. 10-1; atul Doreen Bolger Burke, /. At Jen Weir: An American Impressionist, exh. cat. Ness ark: University of Delasvare Press, 198 li, p. 21fc.

Ci. Roscngarten (1898.9)

4. In the Dooryard is reproduced in Bulger Burke, J. Alden Weir, pi. 28, and

17. J. Alden W'eir

Hildegard Cummings, Helen K. Fusscas, and Susan G. Larkin,). Aldett W'eir:

(W'est Point, New York 1852-1919 New

A Place of His Quit, exli. cat. (Stnrrs, Conn.: The William Benton Museum of

York City)

Art, 1991), pi. 10. 5. John Ferguson \Xeir to J. Alden W'eir, September 21, 1892, J. Alden Weir

Ploughing for Buckwheat lSew ingland Ploughman), 1898 (retouched c. 19)2)

Papers, Archives of American An, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.,

Oil on canvas, 48 1/2 x 55 5/4 in.

roll 125, frame 57. Duncan Phillips, in Julian Alden W'eir: An Appreciation of His Life and

6.

Works (New York: F. P. Dutton, 1922l, p. 58.

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum Purchase, 1912 (12.5)

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Few themes evoked America’s history and identity at the turn of the last century as compelling!)- as the waterfront. The ocean crossings that seekers from the earliest colonizers to the latest immigrants braved to create a new life in a new world shaped the national identity as a land of venturesome voyagers. When they touched on this shore, the new Americans found the coastline a source of immediate sustenance, as does the boy digging clams in John Enneking’s painting (cat. 18). Once settled, many made their position on the water’s edge the basis of their livelihood, as they built ships to harvest the sea and trade with other countries. I he historian John Stilgoe writes, “The seacoast is the threshold of American prehistory and history, of American culture, and like most well-passed thresholds, it is hollowed and worn.”1 He might instead have written “hallowed and worn,’ acknowledging the enduring allure of the rim of the waters. We recognize that timeless fascination in American Impressionist paintings of the waterfront, which call to mind the country’s origins and reflect its transformation at the turn of the last century. By 1700 New England had emerged as one of the world’s great shipbuilding regions, second only to London in the British Empire.2 With plentiful supplies of both lumber and labor, shipyards along the coast turned out a variety of vessels: fishing schooners, whalers, cargo ships for the “triangle trade,” clipper ships remarkable for their speed, and smaller boats for use close to shore. A complex industry requiring the specialized skills of carpenters, blacksmiths, sailmakers, riggers, and dozens of other artisans, shipbuilding brought prosperity to coastal communities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the rime the American Impressionists set up their easels in the shipyards, however, they were recording an industry in decline. The sail-powered fishing vessels that appealed to artists were fast being replaced by steamboats and motorboats. And by 1900 the railroad had captured the freight-hauling trade from the sail-powered coasters that had once transported everything from coal and lumber to strawberries and lettuce.

Keenly aware that they were witnessing a fast-disappearing vestige of the past, the painters and their contemporaries savored the salty antiquity of New England shipyards. Tourist guidebooks for Massachusetts listed the yards in Provincetown and Gloucester as quaint, old-fashioned sights. In Connecticut, Cos Cob’s small shipyard, opposite the Holley House, was described in 1899 as a picturesque ruin: from the upper porch of the boardinghouse, a journalist wrote, artists “could look across the creek to the old mossy dock, and the dull red factory, w-hich is always as quiet as a church. They could see the shipyard beyond it; the rusty ways and the weather-beaten oyster sloops.”3 In The E. M. J. Betty (cat. 22), Theodore Robinson summarized the changes in that shipyard and the transitions in the larger community by juxtaposing a small white sailboat, used tor recreation, with a battered cargo vessel, soon to be retired. Childe Hassam created the illusion of normal industryin Building a Schooner, Provincetown (cat. 20), but the vessel under construction was a pleasure yacht, not one of the fishing boats previously built there, and was the first sizable craft to slide from the ways in a quarter century. Even as the coastal economy accommodated new industries, including tourism, the American Impressionists retained an interest in the waterfront. On their canvases, they recorded the changing character of the landscape. Hassam recorded repair work on the most visible landmark of the railroad that transformed Greenwich, the Mianus River bridge (cat. 21). During his so|ourns in Gloucester, John H. Fwachtman painteel the fishing fleet and warehouses that had long formed the basis of the local economy, but like other summer \isitors, he was charmed by a midget ferryboat that transported passengers back and forth across the harbor (cat. 24). Everett Longley Warner’s view of the New- York waterfront (cat. 25) reveals it as a palimpsest, its layers of history e\okeel by the row of old commercial buildings contrasted with the iconic Brooklyn Bridge. Warner eliel not isolate and romanticize the bridge, as the early modernists would do, but grounded it in the workaday activity along the East River. Three centuries after European fishermen established settlements on America’s coastline, he portrayed the waterfront as a still-vital source of the nation’s energy.

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18. John Joseph Enneking Duxbury Clam Digger (A South Duxbury Clam Digger), 1892

Hnneking made his reputation as a painter of New England landscapes. Traveling from his home in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and, after the 1880s, a summer home in North Newry, Maine, he painted plein-air views of rural New England. A central figure in the Boston art world in the late nineteenth century, he served on the Advisory Committee and the Jury of Selection for paintings from Massachusetts shown at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He showed at important fairs including the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition; the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900; the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901; and the Pan-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, 1915, where he won a gold medal. Nonetheless, he remained a regional New England painter. He never went to New York and never found a national audience. Duxbury Chun Digger is one of five works Enneking sent to the World’s Columbian Exposition, where it was exhibited as A South Duxbury Clam Digger. It depicts a boy clamming in a salt marsh, an activity and environment familiar to any coastal New Englander of the time. Duxbury, thirty miles south of Boston, evokes association with the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The settlement, an extension of Plymouth, was home to William Brewster, John Alden, and Miles Standish, whose house still stands on its main street. Once the location of a thriving boatbuilding industry, Duxbury declined commercially after the mid-nineteenth century and reverted to a rural identity before later emerging as a summer resort. Enneking’s image of a country boy digging clams in the low-lying area where agriculture meets the sea catches the essence of a historic Massachusetts town in a way that is at once accurate, nostalgic, and sentimental. Bent over his task, his right foot sunk in mud, the boy wears high boots and holds a short hoe. His horse, hitched to a wagon, waits patiently in the tall grass. Such grasses were harvested for mulch, and the marshes offered rich habitats for birds. Clamming was a timehonored subsistence activity on the New England coast. As one historian described it in 1890: I he business of clam-digging calls for the minimum investment of capital and the maximum employment of labor, hence it has ever furnished employment and profit to many whose tastes or finances deterred them from embarking in other fishing enterprises. . . . Any man or boy . . . equipped with a short-handled hoe and a pair of long-handled boots, is fully prepared to make the business remunerative.1 Enneking had never been a Yankee farm boy. Before he reinvented himself as the quintessential Boston landscape painter, he was a German-American farm boy from Ohio. During his childhood, his talent for drawing was discouraged. The obligations of farm life and his father's strict Lutheran practice left neither time nor tolerance for the frivolity of schoolboy sketching. When Enneking’s parents died, he went to Cincinnati to live with an aunt and uncle, who arranged for his first art instruction. After serving in the Civil War, he left for Boston. In many respects, he never looked back, but the seriousness, discipline, belief in the efficacy of hard work, and optimism of his farm childhood stamped his character. In this picture, Enneking shows rural labor that is not intrinsically unpleasant and can be understood as character-building. The boy is young and strong, and there is every reason to believe that his future will be whatever he makes it, much like the painter who called him into being. hnneking painted at least two versions of Duxbury Clam Digger. The other (fig. 58) was illustrated in an article on the artist published in 1902. Titled The Clam-Digger, it shows the same boy with his horse and wagon, but seen from behind. A third canvas on this theme. The Clamdigger (1886, location unknown) is a three-quarter-length portrait of a bearded old man, wearing a work hat and holding a basket of clams. AKN

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l ii;. 58. |ohn Joseph Finicking (American, 1841-1916)

Tin't Ijm-Difiger, c. 1892

1. Simeon I . Dcvo, ed., History of RjrnstjbU County. Massachusetts (New 'lork: Blake, 1890), p. 1 '()-

Oil on canvas

2. Jessie B. Rittenhouse, “Ihe Art of John Hnneking,”

I ocarion unknown

Rrush jnJ Pencil 10, no. 6 (September 1902),

pp. 335—44, illus. 340.

18. John Joseph Enneking (Minster, Ohio, 1841-1916 Boston, Massachusetts)

Duxbury Cbm Digger (A South Duxbury Cbm Digger), 1892 Oil on canvas, 22 1/2 x 30 1/2 in. Scripps College, Claremont, California

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19. Cliilde Hassam The Caulker, 1895

As a young artist starting out in Boston, Hassam initiated his longtime practice of painting in various locales during the summers. Gloucester, just one hour by train from Boston, first attracted him in 1880 or 1881. After he settled in New York on his return from Europe in 1889, he began visiting other sites, including Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine. Gloucester was a convenient stopover on his journeys to the Shoals, and he stayed there at least eleven times until he acquired his own country place in East Hampton, Long Island, in 1919. In July 1895 he visited Gloucester with Willard Metcalf. Separately and together, they painted views of the harbor—then America’s largest fishing port—and the shipyards that built and repaired the commercial fleet. Although nearby Essex was the main shipbuilding center, a few yards were located in Gloucester. Shipbuilding was established in the area as early as 1643, when colonists exploited the thick stands of timber along the rocky shore. The process of building a wooden ship had changed little over the centuries, relying on a series of hand operations by a variety of specialized craftsmen using such basic tools as broadaxes, handsaws, augers, and mauls.1 Caulkers, like the blue-shirted man at the lower right of Hassam’s painting, made the vessel watertight by filling its seams with oakum, a type of tarred hemp, and sealing them with hot pitch. They were “a breed all by themselves,” according to the fifth-generation proprietor of one Essex yard. “A rough, tough crowd,” they “customarily worked in pairs or small groups keeping mostly to themselves, yet maintaining a running feud with the carpenters. If a new boat after launching was nice and tight, the caulkers had done a good job of caulking. If she leaked, the carpenters had done a poor job searching for imperfections.”2 Tapping his principal tool, a T-shaped mallet, low on the boat’s hull, the worker here appears to be caulking the devil, a seam that was notoriously difficult to reach and vulnerable to leaking. His next step will be, in shipwright’s parlance, to pay the devil, or waterproof the seam by coating it with tar.' This view of preindustrial labor in a New England shipyard is one of Hassam’s most daring compositions. Combining strategies familiar in Japanese prints but rare in Western art, he filled the foreground with a large feature (the ship’s hull), layering it against the background rather than creating a gradual spatial recession. Much as Hokusai had done in his view of a lumberyard (see fig. 46), Hassam directed the viewer’s gaze around and past the workers to rest on the distant landscape. Each artist employed the geometric structure of the raw materials to impose a pleasing pattern on his composition. In 1910 Hassam sent the painting to the Seventeenth Annual Exhibition of American Art at the Cincinnati Art Museum, where it was shown as The Caulker Gloucester. With his typical self-confidence, Hassam boasted to the museum s director, Joseph Gest, “ Hie ‘Caulker’ is considered by painters one of the best things of its kind ever made—anywhere!”'' SGI.

I lO

I. Dana Story, Frame-up! The Sion of Essex. Its Shipyards and Its People (Barre, Mass.: Barre Publishers, 1964), pp. 2—4. 2. Story, Frame-up.', pp. 24-26. Hmphasis in original. i. tor the phrase “devil to pay, http:/

see http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dcvl.hrm and

vv\v.phrases.org.uk/hulletin_ hoard/2 >/messuges/2 s8.html, accessed March

2005. tor related information,

I am grateful to the caulker Howard Davis and to Renee Seblatmgg and Peter I ittlcfield. 4. t hilde Hassam, New York, to Joseph Ciest, Cincinnati, April 20, 1910, Cincinnati Art Museum Archives, Director’s Correspondence.

19. Childc Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859-1935 l ast Hampton, New York)

The Caulker, 1895 Oil on canvas, 24 1/2 x 20 1/2 in. Cincinnati Art Museum, A. |. Howe Fund (1910.561)

111

20. Childe Hassam Building a Schooner, Provincetown, 1900

Possibly because Provincetown’s location at the tip of Cape Cod made it less accessible than other coastal New England communities, Hassam visited there only once, in 1900. The town, then the most populous on the Cape, was steeped in the historical associations he valued. Before setting foot on Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims sailed into Provincetown Harbor, where they signed the Mayflower Compact, the first written constitution adopted in America. The first European child native to New England was born in Provincetown in the short interval before the Pilgrims, finding the area unsuitable for farming, departed for Plymouth. In the mid-nineteenth century Provincetown led the Cape as a center for whaling and fishing. Shipbuilders thrived along with whalers and fishermen, turning out more than one hundred fifty vessels in 1845 alone.1 2 3 When the fishing and whaling industry entered its long decline in the mid-1870s, the shipyards suffered as well. Hassam’s visit in 1900 coincided with a historic event for Provincetown: the construction of the first large vessel in the town since 1875. John Whitcomb’s shipyard on Commercial Street had once built large fishing and whaling vessels but for the past quarter century had merely repaired them. The commission to build a luxurious pleasure yacht, the schooner Charlotte, for a Chicago millionaire reflected the local economy’s transition from commercial fishing to the increasingly important tourist industry, abetted by a thriving artists’ colony. The yacht commission not only stirred new life into Whitcomb’s shipyard but also spilled over to the wider community. The Charlotte's launch on June 18, 1901, was such a cause for civic celebration that schools were closed so that children could participate in the festivities.: Hassam anticipated the exhilaration of that day in the bright colors and brilliant sunlight of his painting. The ribs of the partially built schooner dominate the composition, dwarfing the carpenters applying planking to the hull. The construction of the Charlotte brought new business to the related trades as well. Another painting from the summer of 1900, Rigger’s Shop, Provincetown (fig. 59), depicts artisans working outside one of the many small workshops that constituted the town’s shipbuilding industry. One writer catalogued a few of the specialized ancillary enterprises tucked among other buildings along the shore: “Where there are vessels there must be sail-lofts. . . . There must be a spar-yard with its odorous floor of pine chips. . . . there must be block-makers, with a log of lingum vitae at the door; there must be calkers [sic] with their ringing mallets; and riggers with knives in their belts; and painters, for no self-respecting crew would . . . put to sea in a vessel that did not look shipshape |and] there must be a blacksmith’s forge, not often busy with horses to be shod, but always red with iron-work for the vessels."’ SGL

111

Fig. 59. Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935)

1. Nancy W. Paine Smith, The Provincetown Hook

Rigger's Shop, Provincetown, 1900

(Brockman, Mass.: Tolman Print, 1922), p. 83.

Oil on canvas, 22 x 19 in.

2. Irma M. Ruckstuhl, Old Provincetown in T.jrly

New Britain Museum of American Art, Bequest of

Photographs (New York: Dover, 198“’), p. f>4.

Mrs. t harles Buchanan (1989.22)

3. Smith, The Provincetown Book, pp. 84-85.

20. Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859-1935 East Hampton, New York)

Building j Schooner, Provmcetoum, 1900 Oil on canvas, 22 x 28 in. Birmingham Museum of Art, Museum purchase

1x3

21. Childc Hassam The Mill Pond, Cos Cob, 1902

Hassam visited his friend John H. Twachtman at his home on Round Hill Road in Greenwich as early as 1894. Between 1896 and 1918 he was a frequent guest at the Holley House in Cos Cob. Of all the places Hassam visited on his summer painting excursions, only the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine attracted him as frequently. Hassam spent an exceptionally long time in Cos Cob in 1902, the year he painted this picture. Sometimes accompanied by his wife, Maud Doane Hassam, he spent much or all of the period from early spring until Thanksgiving in the Old House, as the Holley House was often called. The Hassams were in the process of moving. While living in temporary quarters in New York, they were waiting for construction to be completed on an artists’ cooperative studio building at 27 West Sixty-seventh Street. Staying in Cos Cob, a short train ride from New York, they could oversee work on their new apartment while enjoying a summer in the country. Hassam’s summer painting excursions were intended primarily as opportunities to fill as many canvases as possible with appealing subjects. During his visits to this area, Hassam produced at least twenty-eight oils and many more pastels, etchings, and watercolors. He found most of his subjects inside the Holley House or literally within a stone’s throw of it. The site depicted here, the Mianus River railroad bridge, was out of pitching range, about a quarter-mile away. The bridge had appeared in the background of several paintings, including The E. M. J. Betty (cat. 22) by Theodore Robinson. No longer the backdrop, this time the bridge is the primary subject. Hassam chose a motif with a distinguished pedigree. Railroad bridges were depicted by European painters from J. M. W. Turner to Claude Monet. American artists of an earlier period contrasted the modern technology represented by the railroad bridges with the organic forms of the landscape.' The Mill Pond, Cos Coh owes more, however, to Japanese art. Instead of the horizontal usual for landscapes, Hassam chose a vertical format that evokes Hiroshige’s views of the city of Edo. His composition recalls Japanese examples in its asymmetry, cropping of forms, foreground placement of a large element (here, a floating ladder), and the view through one object (again the ladder) at others in the background. Hassam depicted the railroad bridge when it was undergoing renovation, work that dragged on from about 1901 to 1906.' In his first rendition of modern industrial labor, he matched the locomotives’ speed with the spontaneous dash of his broken brushwork. The train that hurried passengers like Hassam to and from the city speeds past at the right edge of the composition, leaving two-thirds of the canvas to the sparkling water, blue sky, and lush trees that attracted them to places like Cos Cob. The title may have been Hassam’s ironic comment on the transformation of a quiet village with roots in the seventeenth century.

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1. 1 he classic study of this subject is Leo Marx, I be Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New Vork: Oxford University Press, 1964). See also Susan Danly and Leo Marx, eds.. The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MI L Press, 14X8). 2. See my dissertation, “ 'A Regular Rendezvous for Impressionists’: The Cos C ob Art Colony, 1882-1920” (Ph.l). diss.. The City University of New York, 1996), pp. 155-57, 164.

21. Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859-1935 East Hampton, New York)

The Mill Pond. Cos Cob, 1902 Oil on canvas, 26 1/4 x 18 1/4 in. Bruce Museum of Arts and Science I94.2M

I

22. Theodore Robinson The /. M. J. Betty, 1894

In the summer of 1894 Robinson spent seven weeks in Cos Cob. That short period was extraordinarily productive, resulting in about a dozen paintings, all of them depicting sailing craft. The subject was a new one for Robinson, who had never spent a prolonged period at the shore. In the evenings he sometimes sailed or rowed with other artists who gathered at the Holley House (today called the Bush-Holley House), but during the day he focused on the purpose of his visit, painting and sketching along Cos Cob’s small harbor. Greenwich was in transition from a quiet farming and fishing community to a suburb of New York, and Robinson captured evidence of change on his canvases. Looking across the Mianus River to the Riverside Yacht Club, he depicted the pleasure craft belonging to wealthy New Yorkers who had recently purchased country homes in Connecticut. On the Cos Cob side of the river, he directed his attention to the old workboats used for fishing and hauling freight, often painting in the Palmer &c Duff Shipyard. A shipyard had occupied the spit of land across the inlet from the Holley House since the colonial era. Denom Palmer and John Duff took it over in the mid-nineteenth century. At first, the carpenters in their employ built vessels, specializing in the packet boats or “coasters” that carried farm produce from Greenwich to New York markets. By the 1880s, however. Palmer & Duff merely repaired boats. The type of vessel also changed as railroads captured the freight business from the coasters. Palmer told a reporter in 1888 that instead of the old sail-powered workboats that had previously dominated their trade, it “is chiefly pleasure yachts and small steamboats that come into the yard now.”1 To produce this painting, Robinson set his easel in the shipyard near two sailboats undergoing repair. The white paint of the smaller vessel identifies it as a pleasure craft, whereas the black tar coating the larger one, the E. M. /. Betty, marks it as a commercial vessel. The heavy schooner dwarfs the catboat and the workers; fifty feet long, it had a capacity of nearly twenty-five tons.2 Not only did Robinson title his painting after the E. M. /. Betty, but he also made the lettering of its name unrealistically crisp,,compelling our attention to it. In 1894 the E. M. J. Betty was the only packet boat still sailing between Cos Cob and New York. It had already been retired once, in 1890, but returned to the cargo trade the following year, leaving Cos Cob every Saturday night and returning from New York’s Pier 48 on the East River every Wednesday.1 Unable to meet the competition from the railroad, the Betty made its final voyage as a packet boat in 1896.4 In Robinson’s composition, the railroad bridge squashes the battered schooner into a confined space in a visual analogy of the economic pressure the railroad exerted on the cargo fleet. Robinson sent the canvas to two important exhibitions in 1895: his first one-man show, held at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, and the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. SGI.

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1. How the Business this C lunged, Cireenwich Graphic, April 28, 1888, p. 2. For more about representations of (..os C.ob s nautical landscape, see Susan (i. I arkin. The Cos Cob Art Colony: Impressionists on the Connecticut Shore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 6“-102 and passim. 2. Merchant \essels of the l mted States . . . for the V ear t tided June 10, /905 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905), p. 220. Advertisement, “New Packet Line," Greenwich Graphic, September 12, 1891. 4. I he E. M. J. Betty continued in service for other uses until 1904, when it was registered as abandoned, having “gone to pieces after having been submerged for a long time between the bridges at South Norwalk, Connecticut. Report on Ships Register or Enrollment, Works Progress Administration for Connecticut, Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Conn., 1904.

22. Theodore Robinson (Irasburg, Vermont 1852-1896 New \ork City) The E. M. J. Betty, 1894 Oil on canvas, 12 1/4 x 20 in. Private Collection

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2$. John H. Twachtman View from the Holley House, Winter, c. 1901

The son of German immigrants, Twachtman began his professional training in his native Cincinnati. In 1875 he accompanied his teacher Frank Duveneck to Munich, where Twachtman studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts but was more affected by the vigorous brushwork and dark palette associated with the Realist painter Wilhelm I.eibl. In 1880 Twachtman taught with Duveneck in Florence and Venice, where they met the expatriate American artist James McNeill Whistler. Back in Ohio, Twachtman married fellow artist Martha Scudder in 1881 and traveled with her in Holland and Belgium, sometimes accompanied by their friends J. Alden Weir and John Ferguson Weir. During their travels, Twachtman became familiar with paintings by the contemporary Hague School and the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose example further motivated him to lighten his palette and modify the heavy impasto favored in Munich. In his determination to shed the Munich style and improve his drawing skills, Twachtman sailed for France in 1883 and enrolled at the Academie Julian in Paris, where he studied for two years. The paintings of Twachtman’s French period reveal his debt to Whistler in their silvery tones, thinly applied paint, and intimations of Japanese art.1 2 3 4 In 1889 Twachtman began teaching at New York’s Art Students League, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. Also in that year he and his family settled on Round Hill Road in Greenwich, where he found the inspiration for his best-known paintings. So many of Twachtman’s friends came to paint in his company—among them Hassam, Robinson, Weir, Robert Reid, and Henry Fitch Taylor—that a New York critic remarked, “Mr. Twachtman’s country place seems to be a regular rendezvous for Impressionists.Still more arrived after Twachtman established summer painting classes at the Holley Flouse in the Cos Cob section of town. Now known as the Bush-Holley House and operated as a museum by the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, the boardinghouse became the gathering place of a lively colony of artists and winters.' It was also Twachtman’s primary residence in the last years of his life. Probably for financial reasons, he and his family stored their belongings and rented their house by December 1899. At first they lived at the historic Putnam Cottage in Greenwich, but when the oldest child, Alden, received a fellowship to study art in Paris, Mrs. Twachtman and some of the children accompanied him. In their absence, Twachtman spent time in New York, Gloucester, and elsewhere, with the Holley House as his base. Across the small harbor from the Holley House was an old shipyard. Attracted by its salty antiquity, Hassam, Robinson, Ernest Lawson, and Fllnier MacRae made it the subject of their canvases, delineating its rustic buildings, piles of coal and lumber, and workers repairing sailboats. Twachtman, characteristically, took a different approach. Apparently heeding his own dictum, “architecture is beautiful in a picture only when you forget it is architecture,”* he made the modest work site the basis for a nearly abstract composition. Just as Whistler used darkness to simplify forms and eliminate detail in such nocturnes as Blue and Silver—Chelsea (fig. 60), so Twachtman exploited the atmospheric veil of a winter sky heavy with snow to refine the forms of his workaday subject. Like Whistler, he chose a vantage point across the water, incorporating reflections into his Japanesque design. Twachtman’s painting looks back to Whistler and Asian art and forward to the early modernists. The square format draws attention to the canvas’s flat surface, where varied, expressive brushwork offers the same pleasure as Chinese calligraphy or twentieth-century Action Painting. SGL

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f ig. 60. James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-190.?) X net unit’: Blue and Silver—Chelsea, 1871 Oil on wood, 19 3/4 \ 23 "78 in. late Gallery, London, Bequeathed by Miss Rachel and Miss Jean Alexander, 19~2 (TO15"’ 1)

1. The authoritative reference on Twachtman is Lisa Peters, John tidin' Twachtman: An American Impressionist, exh. cat. (Atlanta: I ligh Museum, |9V9i. 2. "Ihe Socien of American Artists," Art Amateur 32 (May 1895), p. 158. 3. See my book the ( ns Cob Art Cninny: Impressionists mi the Connecticut Shore i New York: National Academv ot Design; New Haven: Yale Umvcrsitv Press, 20011. 4. Twachtman made that statement to his students, according to “An Art School at C os Cob," Art Interchange 4? (September 1899), p. 56.

23. John H. Twachtman (Cincinnati, Ohio 1853-1902 Gloucester, Massachusetts) View from the Holley House. Winter, c. 1901 25 1/8 x 25 1/8 in. Heverdejs Collection

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24. John H. Tvvachtman

Little Criant, c. 1900-1902

Tvvachtman spent the summers of 1900, 1901, and 1902 in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In 1900 the whole family stayed at the Rockaway Hotel on Rocky Neck. The following June, Twachtman visited his wife and children in Honfleur, France, returning to Gloucester for the rest of the summer. In 1902 the artist and his daughter Marjorie stayed at the Harbor View Hotel in East Gloucester while Twachtman taught summer classes with Joseph DeCamp, an old friend from Cincinnati. Twachtman died in Gloucester of a brain aneurysm on August 8, 1902, four days after his forty-ninth birthday.1 During his Gloucester period, Twachtman reclaimed elements of his earlier Munich style, reintroducing black into his palette and painting alia prima, striving to achieve his effects with the first application of paint rather than using the complex methods of underpainting, layering, and glazing he had employed in Greenwich.2 Little Giant combines aspects of various phases of Twachtman’s career. The palette retains the pale blues, pinks, and mauves of Impressionism, punctuated with the black of Munich. The quick, bold strokes that define the pier contrast with the. Whistlerian treatment of the thinly painted opposite shore, where white sails and the plume from a smokestack delineate the industrial waterfront. The composition recalls that of Twachtman’s etching The Old Toll House at Bridgeport (1888-89), a Japanesque rendering of a footbridge in the Connecticut harbor.’ Tourism—augmented by a lively art colony—played an increasingly important role in Gloucester’s economy at the turn of the last century. Twachtman enjoyed the camaraderie of other artists there but for subject matter shunned views of leisure activities in favor of the working life of the bustling seaport: the docks, fish-processing plants, waterfront warehouses, and commercial vessels like Little Giant. That small coal-powered steamboat was built in Gloucester in 1878. Constructed of scrap from the shipbuilder’s yard, she boasted oak timbers and planks as heavy as those used in the large fishing schooners.4 The aptly named forty-threefoot-long ferry crisscrossed Gloucester’s inner harbor between 6:30 am and 6:30 pm every day, making a round trip every twenty minutes between the city center and East Gloucester with an intermediate stop at Rocky Neck. Although no beauty, the comfortable, sturdy little ferryboat was considered one of the city’s charms. It served both summer visitors and local residents, whose alternative was “one of the hourly trips around behind the pungent wharves in the lumbering horse-drawn omnibus.’” To escape the heat, elderly women would buy a strip of ten tickets for twenty-five cents and ride back and forth enjoying the sea breezes and harbor bustle. With a stroke of white to indicate the canvas shading the top deck and three hastily sketched figures, Twachtman conveyed the simple pleasure of a boat ride on a summer day. SGI.

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1. For rwachtman’s Gloucester period, see l.isa N. Peters, John Henry Twachtman: An American Impressionist, exh. cat. (Atlanta: High Museum, 1999), pp. 157-68; and John Douglass Hale, Richard J. Boyle, and William H. Gerdts,

Iwachtman in Gloucester, exh. car. (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1987). 1. For Iwachtman s paint handling in Greenwich and Gloucester, see Veters, John Henry Twachtman, pp. 11 ? and 157-58. 3. The etching is reproduced in Mary Welsh Baskert, John Henry Twachtman: American Impressionist Painter as

Pnntmaker (Bronxville, N.Y.: M. Hausberg, 1999), p. 104. 4. ( harles Rodney Pittee, "Ferrv Boat Little Giant Was Once Potent Factor in Gloucester Transport," Gloucester

Times, March 25, 1950, clipping, tiles ot the ( ape Ann Historical Association. 5. Joseph F. Garland, Boston’s \rth Shore (Boston: Little, Brown and Go., 19-8),

p.

316.

24. John H. Twachtman (Cincinnati, Ohio 1853-1902 Gloucester, Massachusetts)

Little Giant, c. 1900-1902 Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Spanierman Gallery, L.LC

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25. Everett Longley Warner

Along the River Front, New York, 1912

Warner began his career as an eighteen-year-old writing art criticism for the Washington (I). C.) Evening Star. He aspired, however, to the other side of the easel and enrolled in classes at the Corcoran Museum Art School and the Washington Art Students League.1 By the time he moved to New York in 1900, Warner had already painted in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1902, while he was still studying at the Art Students League in New York, Warner’s Broadway on a Rainy Evening won the Corcoran prize at the Washington Water Color Club exhibition and was purchased by the museum. This early success with a streetscape reinforced Warner’s choice of subject, one he pursued wherever he lived and traveled. In 1903 Warner went to Paris and enrolled at the Academie Julian. Painting in Paris, Amsterdam, and Bruges, he found inspiration in the everyday life of the modern city. He was back in New York in 1905 but left again in 1907 to spend fifteen months abroad, painting his way through Germany, Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco, Sicily, and Italy. When he returned to New York in 1908, he embarked in earnest on a campaign to paint the city’s streets in a variety of weather and light conditions. In 1909 he went for the first time to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where he spent time with Hassam and Metcalf. Warner continued to achieve recognition with a series of views around Peck Slip in downtown Manhattan, two blocks south of the Brooklyn Bridge. This Last River neighborhood, a living museum of Manhattan history, offered numerous attractions for the artist. It was the site of the Manhattan anchorage of the Fulton Ferry, once the vital link between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Its streets teemed with the activity of the Fulton Fish Market. Fulton Street had been the site of a municipal market since 1822. In 1831 fish merchants moved to their own shed on the river at South Street, and in 1869 a permanent market was constructed. Most striking for Warner was the juxtaposition of some of the oldest surviving structures in Manhattan alongside the splendor and grace of the Brooklyn Bridge. Designed by John Roebling, the bridge opened to great fanfare in 1883, celebrated as an emblem of modern technology in the service of Everyman. While the bridge symbolizes New York’s ascendancy to world power, it is also an object of formal beauty, proof that progress need not be ugly. Through the years it has attracted a legion of artists working in every style and every medium. In 1912 Along the River Eront, New York won the Second Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design in New York. William H. Gerdts writes that Warner “positioned himself at the upper-story window of a building on the Slip between Water and Front Streets” to paint the work. Gerdts identifies the buildings in the picture as “the Mutual Fish Company, the Central Fish Company, and the Lakeside Fish Company,” while “the building on the far left housed the Winona Fish Company on the ground floor, and above, the Globe and Sons Boat firm.” T he waterfront terminal at 20 South Street on the riverfront belonged to the Maine Steamship C.ompany, a line that since 1888 had provided passenger and freight service between New York and Portland, Maine. Two similar canvases by Warner are Peck Slif), New York City (New¬ ark Historical Society) and Falling Snow, New York (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), both perhaps painted later.' AKN

Iii

L P°r the most complete discussion of Warner’s life and oeuvre, sec Helen k. Fusscas, A World Observed: The Art ofEverett I.ongley Warner, IH77-11*6?, exh. cat. (Old Lyme, Conn.: Florence Griswold Museum, 1992i. 2. William H. Gerdts, Impressionist New York (New York: Abbeville Press, 19941, pp. 14S and 170-71. v l or illustrations of the paintings, see Richard J. koke, American l.jndscape and Genre Paintings in The Sen York Historical Society (New York: New-York Historical Society, 19821, vol. s, no. 2803, p. 250, and Fuscass, A World Observed, p. 13, pi. 1.

25. Everett Longlcy Warner (Vinton, Iowa, 18" -1963 Bellows halls, Vermont) Along the River brunt. New York. 1912 Oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Museum PurchaseFund (1914.109)

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23

Factories, Mills, and Quarries

The old expression “to mill and to meeting” conveys the central role of gristmills in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury America. As essential to the settlers’ physical well-being as the meetinghouse was to their spiritual health, a mill to grind grain into meal or flour was one of the first institutions established in any colonial settlement. In fact, it ranked above the church and the town hall as a social bond. Whereas religion and politics often gave rise to divisions within a group, a well-managed mill, indispensable to all, provoked no such controversy. Water powered not only gristmills but also the country’s first factories. In the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, “small manufacturing villages grew up along hundreds of small- and medium-sized streams in the rural Northeast, according to the historian Jack Larkin. “Adapting British technology and organization, most of these rural factories harnessed w'aterpower to drive machinery for spinning and later weaving cotton and wool; others turned chair legs, gun barrels, or clock parts. Marginal rural families left their meager holdings to cluster around the mills; their children and unmarried daughters became the nation’s first factory workers. Edward Rook, Daniel Garber, and Robert Spencer depicted eighteenth-century mills typical of that early type. Rook’s mill (cat. 29), as it was called, had been adapted to manufacturing but was probably idle when he painted it. Garber’s (cat. 27) continued in active use until 1938, still serving its original function as a gristmill. The textile mill Spencer depicted (cats. 31 and 32) operated from 1707 until 1916. All three were picturesque anachronisms, holdouts of rural industry during a period when most factories had relocated to the cities. As early as 1895 a social scientist looked back to reflect on the changes in American industry. “Fifty or sixty years ago small manufacturing establishments in isolated situations and on small streams were scattered all through the Eastern states,” he wrote. “The condition of trade at that time rendered this possible. Now they have almost ”2 wholly disappeared, driven out by economic necessity; and their successors are in the cities and large towns. Exemplars of those new factories inspired canvases by Childe Hassam and J. Alden W eir. Born in the 1 850s, those painters witnessed the transformation of the American economy. In the half century between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I in Europe, the American economy changed more profoundly, grew more quickly, and became more diversified than at any earlier fifty-year period in the nation s history, the historian John Steele Gordon writes. “In 1865 the country, although already a major industrial power, was still basically an agricultural one. Not a single industrial concern was listed on the New 5ork Stock Exchange. By the turn of the twentieth century, a mere generation later, the United States had the largest and most modern industrial economy on earth.”3 The Willimantic Linen Company had grown from small mills like those Spencer depicted to become the largest employer in Connecticut and one of the world s leading producers of cotton thread during the years Weir made it the subject of a series (cats. 34—3 ). True to their optimistic tendencies, the Impressionists suppressed any hint of the labor unrest that erupted throughout the 1890s. Between 1881 and 1905, almost 37,000 strikes involved more than 7 million workers. “With escalating polarization, both workers and managers contended—violently and repeatedly—over every aspect of the spreading wage-factory system of production: work hours, work day, the pace, safety, machinery, conditions, security, and wages,” writes historian Thomas Schlereth. “They fought each other with lockouts and boycotts, with new ‘labor-saving’ machinery and industrial sabotage, with wage cuts and work slowdowns, and with scab labor and organized unions.”4 An ugly nativism swept the country as hysterical editorials blamed the labor unrest on immigrants, who made up the majority of the industrial workforce. “The enemy forces are not American [but] rag-tag and bob-tail cutthroats of Beelzebub from the Rhine, the Danube, the Vistula and the Elbe,” one claimed of the deadly Haymarket riot of 1886. Another insisted, “These people are not Americans, but the very scum and offal of Europe.”- A preacher concluded, “This horrible tyranny is wholly of foreign origin.”6 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge proposed a bill in 1896 calculated to restrict immigration of any but “kindred races”—those from the United Kingdom and other northern European, implicitly Protestant, countries. Lodge based his argument for

tin restriction of immigration on the necessity of ensuring the purity of the “English-speaking race” drawn from the stock “of the great Germanic tribes who reached from Norway to the Alps.” Lodge warned that diluting that stock with immigrants from Italy, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and Asia threatened the national identity. “If a lower race mixes with a higher in sufficient numbers,” he declared, “history teaches us that the lower race will prevail.” Defusing the anxieties their subject matter might have aroused, Hassam and Weir excluded figures from their factor) paintings. Their treatment differs markedly from that of Spencer, some twenty years their junior, who portrayed mill workers enjoying a midday break. For his contemporaries, the small scale and rural setting of the Bucks County mills recalled an earlier, presumably simpler period. Hassam and Weir, depicting modern industrial complexes, required alternative strategies to sustain and promote their characteristic optimism. Against the backdrop of labor unrest and xenophobia, the quarries depicted by Daniel Garber and John Singer Sargent appear comfortingly aloof from human turmoil. The varied underlying rock structure of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Garber lived, provided cobblestones for Philadelphia streets, crushed stone for roadways, building stone, lime, and iron ore. The Delaware River and the canal that ran beside it provided a convenient means for shipping the stone to city ports. Garber incorporated the quarries into his otherwise bucolic landscapes, assuming vantage points that obscured evidence of heavy industry. Sargent, by contrast, positioned himself in the heart of an ancient quarry in Carrara, Italy. The activities of the workers no less than the fundamental majesty of the broken marble inspired a powerful image of humans exploiting nature as they had done on that site for two thousand years.

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26. Daniel Garber Down the River (Quarry), 1917

Garber, an Indiana native, began his professional training at the Cincinnati Art Academy before going east to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where his teachers included William Merritt Chase. When he completed his studies, he received a scholarship that enabled him and his wife to travel for two years in Europe. On their return to the United States in the spring of 1907, the couple bought a country place near Cuttalossa Creek in Lumberville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. During the winters, they lived in Philadelphia, where Garber taught at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1909 until 1950, while garnering awards from exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the National Academy of Design in New York.1 Between 1910 and 1922 Garber devoted at least seven canvases to quarries, both active and abandoned, along the Delaware River near his home. For the monumental Quarry, Evening (fig. 61), he took a position directly opposite a large working quarry. The industrial site extends the full width of the four-by-five-foot canvas, dwarfing the farmers in a field below. Although Garber depicted crumbled stone spilling down the hillside and shacks dotting the open pit, he demonstrated greater interest in the stratification patterns of the exposed rock, linking the warm rust color of the top layer to the autumnal hues of trees along the river. Whereas a massive quarry dominates the Philadelphia canvas, Garber sometimes incorporated smaller quarries into otherwise bucolic landscapes. We glimpse exposed yellow rock through a flowering fruit tree in Buds and Blossoms (1916, collection of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest) and gaze down on another quarry through a stand of pines in A Wooded Watershed (1926, James A. Michener Art Museum).2 3 The focal point of Down the River is the I.umberton quarry, situated on the Delaware River near the mouth of Cuttalossa Creek about a mile south of Lumberville.’ To paint this canvas, Garber chose a vantage point a few miles upstream, setting his easel on a steep bluff that commanded a view of the curving river, divided here by Bulls Island on the left; the Delaware Canal, visible through the trees in the right foreground; and the forested riverbanks. Down the river, the quarry glows like a jar of honey on a windowsill. Garber may have owned one of the houses he depicted, perhaps the small w'hite house in the foreground. A few years earlier, he had purchased a stone cottage on the canal in Lumberville, where he stayed during winter visits to the country while his family remained in Philadelphia.4 I he I.umberton quarry yielded building materials, mainly shale and argillite. In Garber’s day, the stone was shipped to Philadelphia on the canal or transported via a cable tramway across the river to New Jersey, where it was loaded on railroad cars. Contemporary photographs and stereographs reveal the activity at the quarry, with barges tied up along the canal, smoke pouring from the chimneys of industrial sheds, laborers armed with picks and shovels, and wagons pulled by mule teams. Garber distanced himself from that mundane bustle, concentrating instead on the geological strata. Creating a landscape that penetrates beneath the earth’s surface, he linked the human settlement exemplified by the houses and canal with a history measured not in centuries but in eons.

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Fig. 61. Daniel Garber (American, 1880-1958) Quarry, Evening, 1913 Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the \\. P. Wilstach Fund, 1921 (Vi 1921-1-3)

1. Constance Kimmerle, “Daniel Garber," in Pennsylvania Impressionism, ed. Brian H. Peterson (Doyleston, Pa.: James A. Michener Art Museum; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 130, 132. 2. Both paintings are illustrated in Peterson, Pennsylvania Impressionism, pp. 134, 135. 3. I am grateful to Bertha Davis, a Bucks County resident whose family owned one of the local quarries, for identifying the site of Down the River and providing much valuable information about the area. 4. Kathleen Foster, Daniel Garber. ISSO-l^SS, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1980), p. 22.

26. Daniel Garber (North Manchester, Indiana 1880—1958 Lumbervillc, Pennsylvania) Down the River (Qujrry), 1917 Oil on canvas, 25 1/4 x 30 1/4 in. Scripps College, Claremont, California, Gift of the General and Mrs. Edward Clinton Young

129

27. Daniel Garber The Old Mill, 1921

The mill in Garber’s painting played a central role in the history of New Hope, Pennsylvania, a village on the Delaware River about forty miles north of Philadelphia. From the early eighteenth century, a large gristmill at the site then known as Coryell’s Ferry was one of the area’s major employers. When the mill burned to the ground in 1790, the community was thrown into economic depression. The owner, Benjamin Parry, rebuilt it, naming it the New Hope Mill in anticipation that its revival would bring renewed prosperity to the area. Before long, the name New Hope encompassed the town as well.1 New Hope became the center of an artists’ colony when Fldward Redfield settled nearby in 1898 and William F. Lathrop bought an old miller’s house in 1899. During a visit to I.athrop’s home, Garber fell in love with the quiet beauty of the landscape, with its broad, gently flowing river surrounded by rolling hills dotted with stone farmhouses. After his arrival in 1907, many other artists settled in the area, including Robert Spencer, Walter Schofield, and John Folinsbee.2 * Old gristmills were not only cherished local landmarks; one also served as an element in Garber’s home. In the process of transforming his home ground into an expression of himself, the artist remodeled an old barn behind his house into a studio, incorporating timber from an abandoned mill that stood on his property.' While transplanted city residents like Garber were eagerly adapting Bucks County’s picturesque mills into homes, studios, and inns, the mill that had given New Hope its name was still grinding grain for local farmers. In Garber’s painting, two wagons are pulled up outside, ready for loading or unloading. A large tree, perhaps as old as the mill itself, casts dappled shadows on the warm ocher walls, whose reflection shimmers in the gently flowing millrace. Some art historians dispute the Impressionist label for Garber; he himself “greeted a query about his own identity as an ‘American Impressionist’ with a snort.”4 5 However, he so warmlyadmired J. Alden Weir that he briefly adopted the older artist’s first name, Julian, as his own. Commenting on Garber’s solo exhibition at William Macbeth’s gallery in New York in 1925, one critic applauded the artist’s “golden age” realism. “There is a serenity, an all’s well with the world, that suggests this analogy with the Hellenic spirit. And this is in no way to suggest that Garber is a classicist. He is a straightforward American painter of American subjects.” The gristmill in Garber’s painting continued operations until 1938. When it was threatened with demolition, a group including the playwright Moss Hart banded together to purchase the building and convert it into the Bucks County Playhouse." SGI.

I

1. Les Isbrandt, “A Short History of New Hope,” New Hope Historical Society website, http://www.parrymansion.org/newhopehistory.htm, accessed December I, 2004. 2. Brian H. Peterson, “Impressionism Comes to Bucks County: The Story of the New Hope Art Colony," in Pennsylvania Impressionism, cd. Peterson (Doyleston, Pa.: James A. Michener Art Museum; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 1 — 1 5. v Kathleen Foster, Daniel Garber, ISHO-Iv58, c\h. cat. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 1980), p- 24. 4. Foster, Daniel Garber, p. 27. 5. Foster, Daniel Garber, p. 19.

6.

Brooklyn b.aglc, April 5, 1925, quoted in Foster, Daniel Garber, p. 30.

27. Daniel Ciarber

131

7. Isbrandt, “A Short History of New Hope.”

(North Manchester, Indiana 1880-1958

. "A Brief History of the Bucks County Playhouse,” http://www.huckscountyplayhouse.com/playhouse/hcphistory.htnil, accessed December 1, 2004.

8

l.umherville, Pennsylvania)

Hart acquired a country home in the area in 1937; many other theater folk became part-time

Oil on canvas, 41 1/2 x 45 1/2 in.

Bucks County residents. See the Michener Museum’s interactive database at

Private Collection, courtesy of lance

http://www.michenermuseum.org/bucksartists/, accessed December I, 2004.

The Old Mill, 1921

1 lumphries

.

28. Childe Hassam Ice on the Hudson, 1908

Throughout his career Hassam traveled tirelessly in the spring, summer, and fall. Winter was usually studio time, when the artist remained in the city. Hassam looked at Manhattan with an artist’s eye and found inspiration in its architecture, street life, and parks. As with his earlier views of Boston and Paris, he filtered these cityscapes through the lens of varying weather conditions and qualities of light. Rain, snow, fog, dusk, evening, the bright sunshine of midday: all became prisms through which the city looked romantic and magical, anything but quotidian. New York endured particularly harsh weather in January and February 1908. The New York Times treated its readers to a running commentary on the human consequences of cold, snow, and ice. “Baby Blizzard Blows In” the Times reported on January 24. More snow fell and the Times reported difficulties in its removal due partly to very cold weather. January 30 was the coldest day yet, as the temperature ranged from a low of six degrees Fahrenheit to a high of fifteen, with twenty-five-mile-an-hour winds. Cold and snow continued into early February. On February 9 the Times described “ice floes that swept down through the Hudson and East Rivers,” creating havoc for commuter ferries. “The ice came down in acres. . . . Off the Battery the floes in the Hudson and East Rivers met.” Two days later a further discussion of shipping began: “From Sandy Hook to Yonkers ... ice closes the waterways . . . and seriously impedes navigation.”' When the weather moderated sufficiently, Hassam ventured from his West Sixty-seventh Street apartment and painted Ice on the Hudson. Hassam aestheticized the experience of snow and cold. Flis preoccupation in this canvas is the ice, floes of frozen saltwater drifting on a tidal estuary that rarely became icebound. With its high horizon and minimal strip of sky, this work is a skyscape turned upside down. The ice floes become materialized clouds, pulled down and suspended on the water. The picture reads as four horizontal bands. The river takes up two-thirds of the canvas, topped first by shoreline and cliff, then a narrow line of trees, and finally a band of sky. The horizontality is moderated by the oval ice forms and, on the opposite shore, by a factory at water’s edge, a golden-hued cluster of buildings punctuated by two tall cylinders—chimneys. The industrial incursions on both banks of the Hudson provoked heated debate in 1908. The tall bluff on the New Jersey side in Hassam’s painting is the Palisades, a line of columnar rock ranging in height from 200 to 550 feet. This steeply vertical cliff dates to Triassic times, 190 to 225 million years ago, and has long functioned as testimony to the endurance of natural forces in the face of urbanization and industrialization. Around the turn of the century intensive quarrying along the Palisades threatened to destroy the beloved geologic formation. The resulting public outcry prompted the creation in 1909 of the Palisades Interstate Park, running thirteen miles along the Hudson from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Piermont, New York. Hassam’s factory may have been at the northern end of Edgewater, New Jersey, an industrial area with factories for sugar refining, aluminum manufacture, coffee roasting, and chemical manufacture. If so, he was painting in Washington Heights, somewhere south of the present location of the George Washington Bridge. (The bridge was not built until 1931.) I he west bank of the river was the focus of preservationists’ concern, but there was also considerable controversy about the Manhattan shoreline. Ernest Lawson and Geroge Bellows both recorded the small businesses and shanties along the railroad tracks that paralleled the river in Washington Heights. All of Upper Manhattan experienced rapid real estate development in the first decade of the twentieth century. Riverside Drive had earlier been

28. Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859-1935 East Hampton, New York)

Ice on the Hudson, 1908 Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 in. Collection of Jean and Alvin Snowiss

133

developed as a scenic carriageway, but there was significant argument as to how to design the park envisioned for the river shore (now Riverside Park from West Seventy-second Street to West One Hundred Fifty-eighth Street). While Hassam was painting, controversy raged over competing plans for the development of the riverfront at West One Hundred Sixteenth Street, where Columbia University proposed a stadium, playing fields, and a recreational pier. Meanwhile the shoreline remained dotted with train yards, coal bins, and garbage dumps.2 None of this controversy is reflected in Ice on the River. Hassam’s interest in the work site is purely formal. The factory is a benign presence, a source of shape and color that contributes interest to the composition. The artist positions himself on the river side of the railroad tracks, which are thus excluded from this idyllic landscape. AKN

l

F New York rimes:

Baby Blizzard Blows In,

January 24, 1908, p. 2; “Deserters Tie Up Snow Contractors,”

January 26, 1908, p. 12; “Winter’s Coldest Day Kills Three,” January 31, 1908, p. 8; “Northwester Here and Mercury Drops: Ferryboats in Trouble,” February 9, |9()8, p. 3; “Ice Blocks Traffic and Imperils Ships,” February 11, 1908, p. 5. 2. Gregory F. Gilmartin, Stuping the City: New York and the Municipal Art Society (New York: Clarkson Porter Publishers, 1995), pp. 215-18.

29- Edward F. Kook Swirling Water, c. 1917

Edward Rook grew up surrounded by art. His father, a New York stockbroker, owned landscapes by the English artist John Constable and the Americans Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran, and George Inness, as well as academic figure paintings by French and American artists. The young Rook began his professional training at the Art Students League in 1889. Between 1891 and 1901 he lived primarily in France, where he studied at the Academic Julian and painted at Le Faouet, a small art colony in Brittany. He first visited Old Lyme in 1903. Two years later he acquired his own place there and made it his base for the rest of his life.1 In Old Lyme, Rook gravitated to subjects that conveyed a sense of place, notably mountain laurel—whose bloom season he extended by attaching cotton balls to the shrubs when the flowers faded—and an old mill on the Lieutenant River. Rook painted at least eight views of Bradbury’s Mill between about 1905 and 19177 Although other Old Lyme artists also depicted the site, it was so thoroughly identified with Rook that it became known as Rook’s Mill. His paintings evoke the central importance of a gristmill to community life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two of the town’s original settlers contracted to build Lyme’s first mill in 1670. After they died, the town engaged a newcomer as “a skilful sufficient honest miller who shall readyly and well grind the corn which shall be brought by the inhabitants . . . from time to time.” About two centuries later, in 1875, John Bradbury, a weaver and manufacturer, bought the Lower Mill on the original gristmill property and established his wool-scouring business there. The process of washing huge bales of wool stained the river with dirty black wastewater. The mill was probably idle during at least part of the period when Rook made it his signature theme.' His expressive rendering of the churning millrace and drifting clouds infuses Swirling Water with a sense of energy. The season—early spring, suggested by yellow buds on the distant trees—permits an unimpeded view of the bare bones of the New England landscape. Rook was a member of the National Academy of Design and regularly participated in the annual exhibitions there, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Carnegie Institute, and the Corcoran Gallery. Lacking the financial incentive to shape a viable career, he never affiliated with a dealer and set his prices so high that he sold few paintings. In the past quarter century, appreciation has grown for his vigorous brushwork and sophisticated palette. SGL.

•3*»

*■ The basic reference on Rook is Diane Pietrucha Fischer, Edu-ard E Rook, 1870-1^60, American Impressionist, exh. cat. (Old Lyme, Conn.: Florence Griswold Museum, 1987). 2. Fischer, Edward E. Rook, p. 14. L The history of Bradbury’s Mill presented here is based on Susan H. Fly and Elizabeth B. Plimpton, The l leutenant Hirer (Old Lyme, Conn.: Lyme Historical Society / Florence Griswold Museum, 19V|), pp. .$0-53. 4. From 1922—about five years after the last of Rook’s mill paintings—until about 1955, Bradbury’s Mill was used as a manufacturing plant for products ranging from lace to boats. In the mid-1960s it was converted into a private residence.

29. Edward F. Rook (New York City 1870-1960 Old Lyme, Connecticut) Swirling Water, c. 191” Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 38 5/8 in. Florence Griswold Museum, Gilt of Mrs. Chauncey B. Carver (1960.6)

137

30. John Singer Sargent Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara, 1911

Sargent was born in Italy and spent a peripatetic childhood in Europe as his parents, originally from Philadelphia, sought healthful climates for themselves and their three children. Sargent had little formal schooling; instead, he was taught academic subjects by his father, a physician, and became proficient in languages, art, and music. He began his professional training at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. In 1S74 he moved to Paris, where he studied drawing at the Ecole des BeauxArts and enrolled in the independent atelier of the portrait painter Charles-fimile-Auguste Durand (Carolus-Duran). Sargent worked primarily in Paris until 1886, when, following the scandal caused by his portrait Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau, 1883-84, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), he moved to London, which remained his principal residence for the rest of his life. Although Sargent did not visit the United States until he was twenty-one and never lived there for more than a few months at a time, he maintained close ties with American artists and patrons.' Throughout his life, Sargent spent extended periods in Italy. From 1897 until World War I he vacationed there almost every summer. In oils and watercolors, he depicted Venetian canals, Renaissance villas, Baroque gardens, and members of Ins party lounging near Alpine pools in exoticcostumes he had brought along for the purpose. Far removed from that world of privilege and fantasy are his renderings of the marble quarries of Carrara. Located in a valley of the Apuan Alps, a rugged limestone range so white it seems to be snow-covered, Carrara is world-famous for its marble. Since Roman times, workers have cut into the hillsides, exposing rock that sparkles in the sunlight. Michelangelo spent eight months in the quarries, searching the remotest corners for new veins of perfect marble for his sculptures.' In October 1911 Sargent also went deep into the quarries, in pursuit, not of stone, but of subject matter. His stay there resulted in numerous sketchbook drawings (Fogg Art Museum), about sixteen watercolors (twelve are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and two oils, Marble Quarries at Carrara (Earl of Harewood Collection) and Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara* After Sargent’s death, an unidentified friend recalled that while painting at the quarries, Sargent “slept for weeks in a hut so completely devoid of all ordinary comforts that his companions, far younger men, fled after a few days, unable to stand the Spartan rigors tolerated by their senior with such serene indifference.’" An article in an Italian magazine published shortly after Sargent’s visit to Carrara tells a somewhat different tale. Describing the artist as “Italian at heart,” the writer relates that he spent more than a month at the Magrino inn, where he made portrait drawings of Signor .Vlagrino and his son.'- An accompanying photograph of the hostelry' reveals it to be a simple twostory establishment, modest but certainly not a “hut.” Sargent planned to return the following sPritigi according to the article, and the local people were ready to greet him with open arms. Sargent glorified the workers in Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara. The ancient quarry fills most of the canvas, leaving only a patch of sky visible at upper left. Clusters of men toil in the harsh but magnificent landscape, securing the long cables with which they will guide blocks of marble down the mountainside. Although the distant workers are dwarfed by the looming cliff, they have literally broken it, as attested by the grooves incised in the rock, the smooth slabs of marble, and the rubble spilling from the crevices they have hewn. In the foreground, a quarryman coils rope around a peg, straddling a block with the nonchalant grace of a cowboy. A victor in the battle of man versus nature, he is as much a hero as the saints and civic leaders destined to be memorialized in the marble he and his colleagues have wrested from the mountain. SGI.

I 18

I. See 11. Barbara Weinberg and Stephanie 1- Herdrich, John Singer Sargent in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I be Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 57 (spring 2000). 2. Bruce Robertson, ed., Sargent and Italy, exh. cat. (I.os Angeles: l.os Angeles Counts Museum of Art; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 11. ?. Giorgio Vasari, I ires of the Artists (I 568), trails. George Bull (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 342-43. 4. I lame Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, eds„ /obn Singer Sargent, evh. cat. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universits Press, 1998), pp. 232, 2~6.

5. “Memories of Sargent” by A Friend, The London Observer, April 19, 1925, reprinted in Carter Ratcliff, John Singer Sargent (New York: Abbeville Press, 1982), p. 2i4. 6. Spectator, “Noi e II Mondo scopre a C arrara tre disegni inediti di John Sargent, unidentified Italian magazine, April 1912, files. Department of American Paintings and Sculpture. I he Metropolitan Museum of Art. I am grateful to Elizabeth DeRosa for translating this article. The drawings, dated November 1911, are unlocated, according to Richard Ormond i In Sargent s Footsteps, 1900-1914,” in Robertson, Sargent and Italy, pp. 135, 139). Ormond gives the innkeeper’s name as Magroni; it appears in the Italian article as Magrino. 7. Spectator, "Noi e II Mondo scopre a Carrara tre dise*gm inediti di John Sargent.

30. John Singer Sargent (Florence, Italy 1856-1925 1 ondon, England) /binging Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara, 1911 Oil on canvas, 28 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches The Metropolitan Museum of Art, llarres Brisbane Dick Fund, 191” (1”.9”.|) Photograph © 1999 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

I 39

Robert Spencer 3 i. One O 'Clock Break, c. 1913 32. Repairing the Bridge, 1913

Spencer spent the better part of two decades living and painting around New Hope, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. This rootedness, accompanied by an intense fixation on local subject matter, stood in marked contrast to the early years of the artist’s life. The son of an itinerant Swedenborgian preacher, Spencer moved with his family at least six times before he finished high school in Yonkers, New York, in 1899.' Deciding on a career in art, Spencer trained at the National Academy of Design and the Chase School of Art in New York. At the latter, he probably encountered the charismatic leader of the Ashcan painters, Robert Henri, who taught there beginning in 1902. The Chase School championed individuality, self-expression, and a commitment to painting the everyday world.1 2 3 4 Spencer later summed up his art training with the comment, “my real schooling began when I left the ‘art school.”” Spencer’s most important connection to his student days proved to be his friendship with his National Academy classmate Charles Rosen. In 1903 Rosen settled in New Hope. Spencer followed three years later, joining a small circle of artists that already included two landscape painters, Edward Willis Redfield and William Langston Lathrop/ Spencer initially lived in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania, about eight miles up the Delaware River from New Hope. In the summer of 1909 he studied with Daniel Garber while living at Garber’s home in Lumberville. Although Garber was a few months younger than Spencer, he was the senior artist, having already achieved professional recognition. Spencer’s study with Garber marked the beginning of his mature style. After that summer, Spencer moved into the Huffnagel Mansion, a grand but dilapidated eighteenth-century house in New Hope, which he shared with another young artist, Charles Frederic Ramsey. For two dollars a month, Spencer laid claim to the cavernous ballroom, painting and patching it into habitability as a studio and living quarters.5 While living in this romantic ruin, once owned by two local mill owners, Richard Heath and William Maris, Spencer began the closely observed views of mills and workers that brought him his first critical success. One O'Clock Break and Repairing the Bridge depict the same site, the Heath and Maris mills in the Springdale section of New Hope. The building at the center of both canvases was constructed as a gristmill by Richard Heath about 1707. The mill continued under different owners engaged in a variety of milling activities. William Maris purchased the mill in 1812 and in the following year added the building at the left in both paintings for the spinning and weaving of cotton. I he Maris mill burned in 1836 but was reconstructed after the fire. In 1896 Simpson and Co. took it over as a silk mill to weave jacquard. The Heath mill, made taller by a story and one half in 1873, continued operations until 1916. The Maris mill closed about 1920. Spencer famously denied that there was any significance to his chosen subject matter. “I don’t care whether the building is a factory or a mill; whether it makes automobile tires or silk shirts,’ he told the dealer and critic F. Newlin Price. “It is the romantic mass of the building, its placing relative to the landscape and the life in and about it that count. People ask me what is made in my mills. Damned if I know.” To which Price responded, “He might have added: ‘and if I care.’” While the painter denied any political agenda. Price classified him as “a genre painter” concerned with “the intimate, daily romantic life of the people.”’ Brian Peterson,

140

1. The definitive source for Spencer is Brian H. Peterson, The Cities, the Towns, the Crou ds: The Paintings of Robert Spencer, exh. cat. (Doylestown, Pa.: James A. Michener Art Museum, 2004). 1 Knri joined die C hase School faculty in 1902—3, and Spencer studied there in 1903—5, the basis for the assumption that Spencer studied with or at least knew Henri. 3. Quoted in Peterson, Robert Spencer, p. 4. 4. For a broader look at Spencer's art context, see Brian H. Peterson, ed., Pennsylvania Impressionism (Doylestown, Pa.: James A. Michener Art Museum; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

an authority on Impressionism in Pennsylvania, maintains that the buildings were Spencer's primary focus, while the “people are closely observed in terms of clothing and gesture, yet also are distant and anonymous, with facial expressions barely discernible.” Whatever Spencer’s announced intentions, it is clear that he was responding to the remnants in New Hope of layers of history and experience. Between 1910 and 1915 Spencer painted a series of canvases depicting the mills from different angles in different weather conditions and at different times of the day. One O'Clock Break and Repairing the Bridge both date to the productive year of 1913, when Spencer achieved his masterful synthesis of a poetic voice and the technical means to express in paint the beauty he found in the decaying industrial fabric of New Hope. In One O'Clock Break the workers return to the mill on a glorious summer day. The picture is a reminder that most of the mill workers were women. We view them from behind, an emotionally distancing effect. The mill buildings loom fortresslike in comparison to the workers, who seem in no hurry to leave the sunshine behind. Their path to the factory leads them across the Aquetong Creek on the Mechanic Street Bridge, the subject of the second canvas. In Repairing the Bridge the mill hands are inside the buildings; some peer out a large window at the crew working on the bridge. The workers’ body language suggests that they bend to their tasks with goodwill and good energy. The project they undertake appears to be a team effort. The structure they are repairing, however, is clearly antiquated, making their efforts a rearguard activity in a world in which modern technology is heroicized. Repairing the Bridge was exhibited at the National Academy in 1913 and illustrated in the catalogue. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the picture the following year. One O’Clock Break is most likely the painting, shown as One O’Clock, that received honorable mention at the Philadelphia Art Club Exhibition in 1913. AKN

5. The original house was built in 1707 by mill owner Richard Heath. William Maris, who purchased the property in 1812, made renovations in the Federal style. By the time the artists occupied the building, it was nearly derelict, crumbling, and drafty. 6. F. Newlin Price, “Spencer—and Romance,” International Studio ”6, no. 310 (March 1^21), p. 4K >. 7. Peterson, Robert Spencer, p. 33.

141

Mi

^ 1. Robert Spencer iHarvard, Nebraska 1879-19’,| New Hope, Pennsylvania) One Q'C.lock Hrt\ik,c. 1913 Oil on cam as, 29 |/2 \ 24 1/4 in. erdts and Patricia Hills, The Working

lappincott 1 (May 1, 1868), p. 480; quoted in

American Washington, !).( .: Smithsonian Institution,

Ransom R. Patrick, “John Neagle, Portrait Painter,

19~9|; Patricia Hills, “The Fine Arts in America:

and Pat Lyon, Blacksmith,” The Art Bulletin 33

Images of I abor from 1800 to 1950,” in Essays from

(September 1951), p. 188.

the Lowell Conference on Industrial History 1982

8. Patrick, “John Neagle,” p. 188.

and 198?, ed. Robert Weible (North Andover, Mass.:

9. Patrick, “John Neagle,” pp. 189, 191, 192.

Museum of American Textile History, 1985), pp.

10. See Brian T. Allen, Sugaring Off: The Maple

120—64; Elizabeth Kennedy and Katherine M.

Sugar Paintings of Eastman Johnson, exh. cat.

Bourguignon, The People Work: American

(Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark

Perspectives, 1840-1940, exh. cat. (Chicago: Terra

Art Institute, in association with Yale University Press,

Museum of American Art, 2003).

2004); and Marc Simpson, Sally Mills, and Patricia

2. Patricia Hills, The Painters' America: Rural and

Hills, Eastman Johnson: “The Cranberry Harvest,

Urban Life, 1810-1910, exh. cat. (New York:

Island of Nantucket," exh. cat. (San Diego, Calif.:

Whitney Museum of American Art, 1975); Elizabeth

Timken Art Gallery, 1990).

Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of

1 1. Simpson, Mills, and Hills, “The Cranberry

Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,

Harvest,” p. 32.

1991); Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing l abor in

12. Lizzie Champney, “The Summer Haunts of

American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the

American Artists,” Century 30 (September 1885), p.

Work Ethic, 1880—193S (Cambridge: Cambridge

854, quoted in Simpson, Mills, and Hills, “The

University Press, 1999).

Cranberry Harvest, ” p. 42.

3. Betsy Fahlman, John Ferguson Weir: The Labor of

13. “Making a Cranberry Bog,” Harper's Weekly 29

Art (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997).

(October 10, 1885), p. 670.

Fahlman has served as guest editor of two issues of

14. Simpson, Mills, and Hills, “The Cranberry

the Journal of The Society for Industrial Archeology

Harvest,” pp. 42-44. Johnson wrote to his colleague

devoted to industrial imagery in art: vol. 12, no. 2

Jervis McEntee in December 1879 about the “sweet

(1986) and vol. 28, no. 1 (2002). Her essay “The Art

quiet leisure” he enjoyed on Nantucket and would

of Industry: Themes of Labor, Technology, and

miss on his return to New York; quoted in Simpson,

Process in American Art” will be published in a

Mills, and Hills, “The Cranberry Harvest,” p. 38.

forthcoming book on the Steidle Collection of

15. For a perceptive examination of mid-nineteenth-

industrial art by the College of Earth and Mineral

century genre paintings of women, see Elizabeth

Sciences at Pennsylvania State University.

Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of

4. The book accompanied the exhibition of the same

Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,

title at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994.

1991), pp. 137-75.

5. William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism, 2nd ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 2001), p. 320.

16. In her readings of Spencer’s paintings, Elizabeth Johns maintains that they reinforced contemporary ideals about the separate male and female spheres and

American Precedents

“always make it clear (to modern viewers at least) that female domesticity is contingent on power that is

Epigraph: Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and

elsew'here.” Johns, American Genre Painting, p. 163.

Collected Prose (New York: Library of America,

It seems to me, however, that Shake Hands? and Kiss

1982), p. 174.

Me subvert notions of male dominance with the

1. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial

confrontational, mocking, and essentially egalitarian

America, 18S0-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago

expressions of the female models.

Press, 1978). I am indebted to this source for the

17. Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the

history of the American work ethic.

National Landscape (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian

2. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

Institution Press, 1988), p. 23. See also Christopher

(New York: David McKay Company, 1973), p. 13.

Kent Wilson, “Frederic Church’s West Rock, New

3. Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, p. 12.

Haven,” American Art Journal 18, no. 3 (1986), pp.

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The

20-39.

Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.

18. For more information on this painting, see Natalie

Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1992),

Spassky et al., American Paintings in the

p. 133.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, A Catalogue of

Works by Artists Born between lSIB and 1845 (New

May 29, 1879, quoted in Fahlman, John Ferguson

York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), pp.

Weir, p. 100.

250-56.

31. Edmund C. Stedman, in New York Evening Post,

19. Nicolai Cikovskv Jr., “The School of War,” in

May 7, 1868, p. 2, quoted in Spassky et al.. American

Cikovsky and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer, exh.

Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 569.

cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, in

32. Griffin, Homer, Eakins, and Anschutz, pp. 62-63.

association with Yale University Press, 1995), pp.

33. For discussions of Brown’s paintings of

24-25. For another reading of the painting in the

bootblacks and other urban children, see Sarah Burns,

context of Homer’s other post-Civil War images, see

Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century

Randall C. Griffin, Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz: The

American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple

Search for American Identity in the Gilded Age

University Press, 1989), pp. 308-12; and Martha

(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University-

Hoppin, Country Paths and C ity Sidewalks: The Art

Press, 2004), pp. 33-44.

of J. G. Brown, exh. cat. (Springfield, Mass.: George

20. F. Hopkinson Smith, American Illustrators (New

Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 1989), pp. 21-26.

York, 1894), pp. 49-50, quoted in Cikovsky and

34. “The National Academy,” Harper's Weekly 30

Kelly, Winslow Homer, p. 149.

(April 10, 1886), p. 235.

21. “Winslow Homer’s ‘Cotton Pickers,”’ New York

35. “The Academy of Design,” New York Times,

Evening Post, March 30, 1877, p. 2; quoted in

April 4, 1886, p. 4.

Margaret C. Conrads, Winslow Homer and the

36. Robert Koehler, The Minneapolis Journal, March

Critics, exh. cat. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

23, 1901, part II, p. 10, quoted in Patricia Hills, The

Press, in association with The Nelson-Atkins Museum

Painters' America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810-1010,

of Art, 2001), pp. 116-17.

exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American

22. Quoted in Cikovsky and Kelly, Winslow Homer,

Art, 1975), p. 123.

pp. 149—50.

37. For the painting’s provenance, see Annette

23. Cikovsky and Kelly, Winslow Homer, pp.

Blaugrund et al., Paris 1880: American Artists at the

228-29.

Universal Exposition, exh. cat. (Philadelphia:

24. Marc Simpson, “The 1880s,” in Darrel Sewell,

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in association

org., Thomas Eakins, exh. cat. (Philadelphia:

with Harry N. Abrams, 1989), pp. 180-81; and Hills,

Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), pp. 111-12; and

The Painters' America, p. 123. The painting belonged

Mark Tucker and Nica Gutman, “Photographs and

to Baxandall when Hills illustrated it in 1974; to

the Making of Paintings,” in Thomas Eakins, pp.

Richard Manoogian when it was in the Paris 1889

226-31.

exhibition; and to the Deutsches Historisches

25. “The Fine Arts,” Daily Evening Telegraph

Museum in Berlin by 1993, when Revisiting the

(Philadelphia), October 17, 1881, p. 4, quoted in

White City was published. Carolyn Kinder Carr et al..

Simpson, “The 1880s,” p. 111.

Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1804

26. Betsy Fahlman identifies three of the visitors as

World's Fair, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National

foundry superintendent Robert Parker Parrott, Mrs.

Museum of American Art and National Portair

Parrott, and Gouverneur Kemble, Parrott’s

Gallery, 1993), p. 180.

predecessor, who had established the foundry in 1818.

38. See Pamela Beecher, A Pastoral Legacy: Paintings

Betsy Fahlman, John Ferguson Weir: The Labor of

and Drawings by the American Artists Ridgway

Art (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997),

Knight and Aston Knight, exh. cat. (Ithaca, N.Y.:

p. 81.

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1989).

27. The first version of Forging the Shaft was

39. Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown

destroyed in a fire in 1869. Weir painted a replica,

Dutch Period in American Art and Culture

now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1877.

(Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1998).

See Fahlman, John Ferguson Weir, pp. 107-10; and Spassky et al., American Paintings in the

Cosmopolitan Sources

Metropolitan Museum of Art, pp. 568-73. The Metropolitan catalogue entry dates the first version to

1. See H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris:

1867-68; Fahlman, however, documents preliminary

Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their

drawings in 1866.

French Teachers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991).

28. Quoted in Fahlman, John Ferguson Weir, p. 102.

2. Bernice Kramer Leader, “The Boston School and

29. John Ferguson Weir to Jervis McF.ntee, July 22,

Vermeer,” Arts Magazine 55 (November 1980), pp.

1867, McEntee Papers, Archives of American Art,

172-76; and Leader, "The Boston Lady as a Work of

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., quoted in

Art: Paintings by the Boston School at the Turn of the

Fahlman, John Ferguson Weir, p. 96.

Century” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1980).

30. “Academy Notes,” New York Evening Post,

3. Jan Vermeer of Delft, vol. 5 in Masters in Art series

179

i Boston: Bates and Guild, 1904). The identification of

Millet,” pp. 694-96; and Meixner, French Realist

Hale as the editor is from l eader, “The Boston School

Painting, pp. 72-78.

and Vermeer," pp. 174 and 176 n. 28.

20. John van Schaick, “Sermon on ‘The Man with the

4. See Stanley Melt/off, “The Rediscovery of

Hoe,’” New York Daily Tribune, September 4, 1899,

Vermeer,” Marsyas 2 (1942), pp. 145-66.

p. 2, quoted in Meixner, French Realist Painting, p.

5. The quotation is from the diary of Theodore

119.

Robinson, Townshend, Vt., August 12, 1895.

21. Laura L. Meixner, An International Episode:

Robinson's diary from March 29, 1892, to March 50,

Millet, Monet, and Their North American

1896, is at the Frick Art Reference Library, New

Counterparts, exh. cat. (Memphis, Tenn.: Dixon

York. The painting on which he was working when

Gallery and Gardens, 1982), p. 125.

he made that entry is Correspondence (1895, location

22. J. Alden Weir, Paris, to Susan Martha Bayard

unknown; reproduced in John 1. H. Baur,

Weir, West Point, N.Y., April 21, 1874, transcribed in

“Photographic Studies by an Impressionist,” Gazette

Dorothy Weir Young, The Fife and Letters of J. Alden

des Beaux-Arts 50 |October-December 19461, p. 330).

Weir (1960; reprint. New York: Kennedy Graphics

6. Robinson’s diary, Townshend, Vt., September 28,

and Da Capo Press, 1971), p. 35.

1895.

23. J. Alden Weir, Paris, to Susan Martha Bayard

7. Henry Havard’s Van der Meer dc Delft (Paris:

Weir, West Point, N.Y., April 20, 1875, transcribed in

I.ibrairie de 1'Art, 1888) is listed in the bibliography

Young, J. Alden Weir, p. 74. The exhibition to which

of the 1904 publication edited by Hale. An

Weir referred featured forty-six of Millet’s drawings

introduction to the bibliography notes that “in the

from the collection of Flmile Gavet, held at the Galerie

light of more recent discoveries regarding the

Georges Petit in April 1875. I am grateful to Bradley

painter," Havard’s book “supplements or corrects

Fratello for this information.

many of Biirger’s statements.”

24. J. Alden Weir, Barbizon, to Susan Martha Bayard

8. S. J. Woolf, “Hassam Speaks Out for American

Weir and Robert W. Weir, presumably Hoboken, N.J.,

Art,” New York Times Magazine, October 14, 1934,

April 6, 1877, transcribed in Young,/. Alden Weir, p.

sec. 6, p. 7.

122.

9. Robinson’s diary. New York, February 7, 1893.

25. J. Alden Weir, New York, to

Robinson also referred to Constable in his diary entry,

Portland, Oreg., January 4, 1899, quoted in Young,

Napanoch, N.Y., October 28, 1893.

/. Alden Weir, p. 211.

C.

E. S. Wood,

10. Theodore Robinson, “Jean-Baptiste-Camille

26. Robinson’s diary. New York, November 21, 1894.

Corot,” in Modern French Masters: A Series of

27. Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the 90s: The Series

Biographical and Critical Reviews by American

Paintings, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, in

Artists, ed. John C. Van Dyke (New York: Century

association with Yale University Press, 1989), p. 73.

Co., 1896), p. 112.

28. Roger Marx, “Les Meules de M. Claude Monet,”

11. Alfred Sensier, Jean-Francois Millet: Peasant and

Le Voltaire, May 7, 1891, quoted in Tucker, Monet in

Painter, trans. Helena de Kay (Boston: James R.

the 90s, p. 104.

Osgood, 1881), pp. 83-84.

29. Robinson’s diary, Giverny, September 5 and July

12. For an intriguing study of changing French

3, 1892.

response to Miller, see Bradley Fratello, “France

30. Robinson’s diary, New York, February 23, 1894.

Embraces Millet: The Intertwined Fates of The

31. See Eunice Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy

Gleaners and The Angelus," The Art Bulletin 85

Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley:

(December 2003), pp. 685-701.

University of California Press, 1986), pp. 116-50.

13. Crayon 4, part 10 (October 1857), p. 312, quoted

32. Octave Uzanne, La Femme a Paris (1894), quoted

in Laura L. Meixner, French Realist Painting and the

in Lipton, Looking into Degas, p. 160. For a valuable

Critique of American Society, 186S-1900 (New York:

study of Degas’s milliners, see Lipton, pp. 153-64.

Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 32.

33. The bibliography on Japanism is extensive.

14. Pictor Ignotus, “Art in Boston,” Round Table 2,

Especially pertinent to this essay is Doreen Bolger,

no. 28 (June 25, 1864), p. 26, quoted in Meixner,

“American Artists and the Japanese Print: J. Alden

French Realist Painting, pp. 35-36.

Weir, Theodore Robinson, and John H. Twachtman”

15. Fratello, “France Embraces Millet,” p. 691.

in American Art around 1900: Lectures in Memory of

16. Fratello, “France Embraces Millet,” p. 685.

Daniel Fraad, ed. Bolger and Nicolai Cikovsky Jr.

1". Clarence Cook, “Pictures from the Secretan Sale,"

(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990),

Studio, n.s., 3, no. 7 (June 1889), pp. 99-100, quoted

pp. 15-27. Other valuable studies include Clay

in Meixner, French Realist Painting, pp. 76-77.

Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America (New

18. Meixner, French Realist Painting, p. 83.

York: Walton H. Rawls/Twayne Publishers, 1963);

19. For more on the 1889 auction and subsequent

Siegfried Wichmann, Japonisme: The Japanese

American tour, see Fratello, "France Embraces

Influence on Western Art in the 19th and 20th

Centuries (New York: Park Lane, 1985); William

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960),

Hosley, The japan Idea: Art and I ife in Victorian

pp. 103-4. Chapter 9, “Impressionism,” was probably

America, exh. cat. (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth

based on a lecture Garland gave in 1893 but may not

Atheneum, 1990); and Gabriel P. Weisberg and Julia

have been published before its appearance in the

Meech, japonisnie Comes to America: The Japanese

book, a collection of Garland’s essays on painting

Impact on the Graphic Arts, 1876-1925 (New York:

and literature.

Harry N. Abrams, 1990).

10. Impressions on Impressionism recorded a

34. Wichmann considers as subject matter “birds,

conversation among Garland, his brother-in-law the

beasts and flowers” and landscape elements including

sculptor Lorado Taft, and the Tonalist painter Charles

bridges, but not workers.

Francis Browne as they toured the Seventh Annual

35. Robinson’s diary, New York, December 5, 1893,

Exhibition of American Paintings at the Art Institute

and February 11, 1894.

of Chicago. Robinson found the pamphlet “witty and

36. For information on some of the prints in Weir’s

sensible and suggestive—the sort of thing that ought

collection, see Bolger, “American Artists and the

to do good”; Robinson's diary. New York, December

Japanese Print,” pp. 18-25; and Doreen Bolger Burke,

19, 1894.

J. Alden Weir: An American Impressionist (Newark:

11. Robinson’s diary, Townshend, Vt., September 2,

University of Delaware Press; New York: Cornwall

1895.

Books, 1983), pp. 202-12 and passim. Most of the

12. Theodore Robinson, Townshend, Vt., to Harrison

prints are at Brigham Young. Weir Farm retains a

S. Morris, Philadelphia, October 27, 1895; Morris,

few illustrated books as well as objects including an

Philadelphia, to Robinson, Townshend, October 29,

inkstone.

1895; Archives, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine

37. See Robinson’s diary entries for February 16,

Arts, Correspondence files of Harrison S. Morris. 1

1894, and January 30 and 31, 1895. He amassed

am grateful to Archivist Cheryl Leibold for making

thirty-two prints: twenty-four by Koryusai, three by

these letters available to me.

Utamaro, and five by Banri.

13. Alvan F. Sanborn, “Future of Rural New England,” Atlantic Monthly 80, no. 477 (July 189"),

American Impressionist Images of Labor

p. 83, quoted in Laura L. Meixner, French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society,

1. John Ferguson Weir, “American Art: Its Progress

1865-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press,

and Prospects,” Princeton Review 54 (May 18 8), pp. 828-29.

1995), p. 104. 14. Adeline Adams, Childe Hassam (New York:

2. W. Mackay Laffan, “The Material of the American

American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1938), p. 121.

Landscape,” American Art Review 1 (November

15. Spencer was acknowledged during his lifetime to

1879), p. 31, quoted in Randall C. Griffin, Homer,

have suffered from chronic depression. The likelihood

Eakins, and Anshutz: The Search for American

that his illness was actually bipolar disorder (often

Identity in the Gilded Age (University Park:

called manic-depression) is stated by Brian Peterson in

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 46.

The Cities, the Towns, the Crowds: The Paintings of

3. Lizzie W. Champney, “The Summer Haunts of

Robert Spencer, exh. cat. (Doyleston, Pa.: James A.

American Artists,” Century Magazine 30 (October

Michener Art Museum, in cooperation with

1885), p. 845. 4. William Mackay Laffan and Edward Strahan [Earl

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 10.

Shinn|, “The Tile Club Afloat,” Scribner’s Monthly

the Dewitt McClelland Lockman Papers, Archives of

19 (March 1880), p. 647, quoted in Ronald G. Pisano

American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,

et al.. The Tile Club and the Aesthetic Movement in

D.C., c. 1925-30, quoted in Peterson, The Cities, the

America, exh. cat. (Stony Brook, N.Y.: The Museums

Towns, the Crowds, p. 22.

at Stony Brook, 1999), p. 35.

17. The New York Public Library American History

5. “The Tile Club at Whitehall,” New York Times,

Desk Reference (New York: Hyperion, 2003), p. 338.

16. Robert Spencer, from an undated manuscript in

July 10, 1879, p. 5.

18. Robinson’s diary. New York, February 14, 1894.

6. Griffin, Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz, pp. 66-67,

19. Robinson’s diary. New York, February 16, March

95-97, 131-32, and passim.

31, April 7, 11, and 12, 1894. “Need Not Starve or

7. Robinson to Cox, May 31, 1883, quoted in H.

Beg,” New York Times, April 11, 1894, p. 8.

Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-

20. William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction, and

Century American Painters and Their French Teachers

Other Essays (1891; New York: New York University

(New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), p. 212.

Press, 1959), p. 62.

8. Robinson’s diary, Brielle, N.J., September 29, 1894, Frick Art Reference Library, New York. 9. Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols (1894; reprint,

The City

12. John H. Twachtman, New York, to Josephine Holley, Cos Cob, Conn., January 17, 1902, Archives,

1. Samuel I anc Loomis, “The (irowth of Great

Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich.

Cities," Andover Renew 7 (April 1887), pp. .341-42,

13. Hassam wrote that statement to John W. Beatty,

quoted in II. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and

director of fine arts of the Carnegie Institute in

David Park Curry, American Impressionism and

Pittsburgh, on March 8, 1920, noting that “if you see

Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-19! 3,

fit to print it in the catalogue it should I think prove

exh. cat. (New York: Die Metropolitan Museum of

of interest to the observer.” The letter, in the archives

Art, 1494), p. 135.

of the Carnegie Institute, is quoted in Gail Stavitsky,

2. For the definitive treatment of this subject, see

“Childe Hassam and the Carnegie Institute: A

Robert I . Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and

Correspondence,” Archives of American Art Journal

Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press,

22, no. 3 (1982), p. 6. For clarity, I corrected

1988).

Hassam’s misspelling of “growth” as “groth.”

3. Two valuable studies of the American

Tanagra was included in the 19th Annual

Impressionists’ urban views are Weinberg, Bolger, and

International Exhibition of Paintings at the Carnegie

Curry, American Impressionism and Realism; and

Institute from April 29 to June 30, 1920.

William H. Gerdts, Impressionist New York (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994). 4. Henry J. Fletcher, “The Drift of Population to

The Countryside

Cities: Remedies,” Forum, August 1895, reprinted in

1. F. J. Kinsbury, “In Defense of the City,” Journal of

The Annals of America 12 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia

Social Science, no. 33 (November 1895), reprinted in

Britannica, 2003), p. 56. Fletcher was a law professor

The Annals of America 12 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia

at the University of Minnesota.

Britannica, 2003), p. 66.

5. The quotation is from “The Cockney Columbus”

2. Woods Hutchinson, “The Physical Basis of Brain-

by David Christie Murray, New York Herald, sec. 5,

Work,” North American Review 146 (May 1888), pp.

p. 1, January 13, 1895, as transcribed in Theodore

522-31, quoted in T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of

Robinson’s diary, January 14, 1895. Robinson’s

Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of

transcription is faithful, with the dashes functioning

American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon

as ellipses.

Books, 1981), p. 28.

6. See Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia

3. Thomas Jefferson, Query 19, in Notes on Virginia

M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan

(Paris, 1784), reprinted in Adrienne Koch and

Artists and Their New York, exh. cat. (Washington,

William Peden, eds., The Life and Selected Writings of

D.C.: National Museum of American Art, in

Thomas Jefferson (New York: Modern Library,

association with W. W. Norton, 1995).

1944), p. 280.

7. Several scholars have noted the similarities between

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Farming” (1858) in The

Hassam’s painting and those of contemporary French

Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.

academics and Impressionists; see, for example,

Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1992),

Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism

p. 681.

and Realism, pp. 174-75.

5. John T. Schlebecker, Whereby We Thrive: A

8. Mina Fonda, Laconia, N.H., to Leonard Ochtman,

History of American Farming, 1007-1972 (Ames:

Mianus, Conn., July 3, 1890, Archives, Bruce

Iowa State University Press, 1975), p. 174.

Museum.

6. Thomas P. Westendorf, “Benny Come Back to the

9. Walter Wellman, “Rise of the American City: The

Farm” (1880); this and comparable songs can be

Wonderful Story of the Census of 1900,” McClure's

viewed at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem in the

Magazine 17 (September 1901), p. 471, quoted in

databases Music for the Nation: American Sheet

Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, American Impressionism

Music, 1870-1885 and Historic American Sheet

and Realism, p. 180.

Music, 1850-1920.

10. Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of

7. Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three

New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press,

Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover,

1995), p. 922.

N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982),

1 1. George Hill, “A Metropolitan Standard of

p. 256.

Buildings,” Real Estate Record and Guide 73 (June

8. Florine Thayer McCray, “The Possibilities and

1 1, 1904), pp. 1395-427, cited in Robert A. M.

Privileges of Country Life in Connecticut,” Twenty-

Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and John Montague

fifth Annual Report, Connecticut Board of

Nlassengale, New York I 900: Metropolitan

Agriculture 1891 (Hartford, Conn., 1892), pp.

Architecture and Urbanism, 1890-1915 (New York:

298-311, quoted in Jack Larkin, The Weir Farm:

Rizzoli, 1983), p. 20.

Working Agriculture and the Vision of Rural l ife in

New England, 1860-1940 (Wilton, Conn.: National

3. John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: I he

Park Service Cultural Landscape Report, 1996), p. 14.

Epic Historx of American Economic Power (New

9. Constant Holley MacRae, Cos Cob, Conn., to

York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 205.

Josephine Holley, Rock, Mass., October 28, 1902,

4. Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America:

Archives, Historical Society of the Town of

Transformations in Everyday Life, IS7o-ll>l s (New

Greenwich.

York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 33-34.

10. Robinson’s diary, Townshend, Vt., May 25, 1895,

5. Quoted in John Higham, Strangers in the I and:

Frick Art Reference Library, New York.

Patterns of American Nativisnt, 1860-1925 (New

11. Robinson’s diary, Townshend, Vt., May 25,

York: Atheneum, 1981), pp. 54-55.

August 24, September 9, and October 25, 1895.

6. Quitted in Higham, Strangers lit the Land, p. 138.

12. J. Alden Weir, Branchville, to Anna Bartlett

7. Henry Cabot Lodge, "For Immigration

Dwight Baker, Windham, October 21, 1883; Dorothy

Restrictions," reprinted in part in The Annals of

Weir Young, The Life ami Letters of J. Alden Weir

America (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2003),

(1960; reprint. New York: Kennedy Graphics and Da

vol. 12, pp. 89, 91.

Capo Press, 1971), p. 162. 13. For a valuable study of the Branchville property,

The Home

see Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., F.lizabeth Milroy, Harold Spencer, and Hildegard Cummings, A Connecticut

1. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (New York:

Place: Weir Farm, an American Painter’s Rural

Signet Classic, 198.3), pp. 110-1 I. Alcott never

Retreat, exh. cat. (Wilton, Conn.: Weir Farm Trust

married and defined herself as an author who

in collaboration with The National Park Service,

glorified the traditional patterns she rejected in her

Weir Farm National Historic Site, 2000).

own life.

14. Larkin, The Weir Farm, p. 45.

2. Quoted with this spelling on the label for Spencer’s

15. Young, Life and Letters, p. 193.

Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the 'Lasses at the Brooklyn

16. J. Alden Weir Papers, Archives of American Art,

Museum.

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., roll 125,

3. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother:

frame 40.

The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open

17. Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America:

Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books,

Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915 (New

1983), pp. 3-4.

York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 39.

4. Harvey Green, The Light of the Home: An

18. The dates of Remy’s tenure are given in Larkin,

Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian

The Weir Farm, p. 35. For a reference to Remy’s wife

America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp.

and sons, see also Albert Pinkham Ryder, Branchville,

74-75.

to J. Alden Weir, New York, May 5, 1897,

5. Helen Campbell, The Easiest Way in Housekeeping

transcribed in Young, Life and Letters, pp. 188-89.

and Cooking (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), pp. 55-56.

The Waterfront 1. John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. ix. 2. John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic Flistory of American Economic Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 30-31. 3. "A Small Art Colony,” New York Commercial Advertiser, July 22, 1899, p. I.

Factories, Mills and Quarries 1. Jack Larkin, “Rural Life in the North,” in Encyclopedia of American Social Flistory, ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton, Flliott J. Corn, and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 1213-14. 2. F. J. Kinsbury, “In Defense of the City,” Journal of Social Science, no. 33 (November 1895), reprinted in The Annals of America (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2003), vol. 12, p. 63.

6. Campbell, The Easiest Way, p. 58; Green, The Light of the Home, p. 75.

Artists Chase, William Merritt, cat. 38 DeCamp, Joseph, cat. 39 Enneking, John Joseph, cat. 18 Garber, Daniel, cats. 26, 27 Hale, Ellen Day, cat. 40 Hassam, Childe, cats. 1-5, 19-21, 28 Lawson, Ernest, cats. 6, 8 Mannheim, Jean, cat. 41 Metcalf, Willard, cats. 9, 10 Miller, Richard, cat. 42 Potthast, Edward, cat. 11 Robinson, Theodore, cats. 7, 12-15, 22, 43, 44 Rook, Edward F., cat. 29 Sargent, John Singer, cat. 30 Shulz, Ada Walter, cat. 45 Spencer, Robert, cats. 31-33 Steele, Theodore C., cat. 46 Twachtman, John H., cats. 23, 24 Warner, Everett Longley, cat. 25 Weir, J. Alden, cats. 16, 17, 34-37

Lenders Addison Gallery of American Art Arizona State University Art Museum Art Museum of Western Virginia Birmingham Museum of Art Bowers Museum of Cultural Art Brooklyn Museum Bruce Museum of Arts &i Science Carnegie Museum of Art Rhoda and David T. Chase Cincinnati Art Museum Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Davies The Detroit Institute of Arts The Douglass Collection Florence Griswold Museum Robert L. and Ellen E. Haan Heverdejs Collection Kennedy Galleries Inc., New York Lilly Endowment Inc. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Academy Museum National Gallery of Art National Museum of Women in the Arts Peter and Gail Ochs Portland Art Museum Private Collections Scripps College Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden Smith College Museum of Art Jean and Alvin Snowiss Spanierman Gallery, LLC T. C. Steele State Historic Site, Indiana State Museum Collection Toledo Museum of Art Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum Wright Museum of Art

Credits Rights anti Reproduction Photographs of works of art reproduced in this volume have been provided in many cases by the owners or custodians of the works, individual works of art appearing herein may be protected by copyright in the United States of America or elsewhere, and may thus not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the copyright owners. The following and/or other photograph credits appear at the request of the artists’s representatives and/or owners of individual works. Cat. 10

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, All rights reserved

Cat. 12 Cat. 16

Photograph © 1986 The Detroit Institute of Arts Photograph © Portland Art Museum

Cat. 30

Photograph © 1999 All rights reserved. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cat. 32

Photograph © 2001 All rights reserved. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cat. 36/cover Photograph © 1993 All rights reserved. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Cat. 39 Photograph © 2005 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Illustrations Figs. 1, 2, 3,-212, 35 Fig. 5 Figs. 8, 9, 16, 24, 25,

Photograph © 1996 Ohio Historical Society

38, 39, 40, 46, 63, 67

All rights reserved. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fig. 10 Fig. 11

Photograph © 1994 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Fig. 18

Photograph © September 2005 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photograph © 2005 Museum Associates/!. ACM A Photograph courtesy of the Boca Raton Museum of Art

Figs. 23, 37, 43 Fig, 26

Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago

Fig. 27 Fig. 28

Photograph © 1998 Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery All Rights Reserved Art Resource NY, Louvre, Paris, France

Photograph courtesy of Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc.

Figs. 29, 30

Photographs © The National Gallery, London

Fig. 31 Fig. 32

Art Resource NY, Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France

Fig. 33 Fig. 34 Fig. 36 Fig. 41 Fig. 42

Reunion des Musees Nationaux/ Art Resource NY, Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France Photograph © 2004 J. Paul Getty Trust Photograph courtesy of Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource NY, Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France Art Resource NY, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris, France © 2002 Norton Simon Art Foundation

Figs. 44, 45 Fig. 54 Fig. 55

Courtesy of Brigham Young University Museum of Art. All Rights Reserved Tate Gallery, London, Great Britain/Art Resource, NY

Fig. 56 Fig. 60

Photograph © Museum of the City of New York Photograph © 2005 Tate, London

Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s

Fig. 62

Photograph © 2005 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Fig. 66

Photograph credit: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago/Art Resource, NY

Photography Michael Agee Rick Echelmeyer C.Jean F'rich Lessing/

i 86

figs. 7, 49, 59 cat. 27 fig. 32

Art Resource NY

figs. 28,31,41

Paul Mutino

cats. 11,31

The word “Impressionism" has long been identified with images of leisure. The French Impressionists announced their modernity by portraying fashionably dressed people dining in the open air, strolling along garden paths, or enjoying an evening at the theater. Although the American Impressionists also portrayed women in white dresses twirling parasols, they devoted almost equal attention to workers: farmers, washerwomen, flower vendors, shipbuilders, bargemen, hackney drivers, construction workers. Their landscapes depict not only city parks and seaside resorts but also worksites—shipyards and quarries, farms and factories. Free of the baggage of the European class system, the American Impressionists expressed the deeply rooted American belief in the nobility of honest toil. They did not depict laborers as oppressed drudges, as many European painters had done. Instead, the workers in American Impressionist paintings are always dignified and sometimes heroic. This publication accompanies an exhibition presenting forty-six paintings by twenty artists. The essays and catalogue entries survey American, European, and Japanese precedents and provide a cultural context for the treatment of the theme of labor, drawing on such diverse sources as poetry, popular songs, census reports, and home-economics books. Susan G. I.arkin is the author of The Cos Cob Art Colony: Impressionists on the Connecticut Shore and was the curator of the exhibition of the same title. She was co-author of American Impressionists Abroad and at Home: Paintings from the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has written and lectured widely on American art.

PHILLIPS ACADEMY

3 1867 00218

ISBN 0-71 1 2-2585-0