Renoir Drawings @ The Morgan, NYC - Exhibition of drawings, watercolors, and pastels of the French Master of Impressionism

Renoir Drawings

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

October 17, 2025 - February 8, 2026

Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

Portrait of a Girl (Elisabeth Maître), 1879

Pastel on Ingres paper

The Albertina Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection, DL535

While the paintings of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) have become icons of Impressionism, his drawings, watercolors, and pastels are far less widely known. In fact, drawing remained central to his artistic practice even as his interests and ambitions changed over the course of a long career. This exhibition explores the ways in which Auguste Renoir used paper to test ideas, plan compositions, and interpret both landscape and the human figure.

Thematic sections cover the full span of the artist’s career, ranging from academic studies he made as a student, to on-the-spot impressions of contemporary urban and rural life, to finished, formal portraits, to intimate sketches of friends and family completed late in life. In-depth case studies of favored themes and preparatory work for landmark canvases further illuminate Renoir’s practice of drawing.

Inspired by the major gift to the Morgan of a large-scale preparatory sketch for one of Renoir’s most significant paintings, The Great Bathers, this exhibition is the first in a century to explore the artist’s works on paper in depth. Organized by the Morgan Library Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Renoir Drawings brings together nearly one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and a small selection of paintings, enabling visitors to engage with Renoir’s creative process while offering insights into his artistic methods over five decades.

Organized by Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director, and Sarah Lees, Research Associate.

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016

www.themorgan.org

Mary Cassatt at Work @ Philadelphia Museum of Art + FAMSF Legion of Honor, San Francisco. A large-scale exhibition

Mary Cassatt at Work

Philadelphia Museum of Art

May 18 – September 8, 2024

MARY CASSATT 

Lydia Seated in the Garden with a Dog on Her Lap, 1878–79 

Oil on canvas, 10 3/4 × 16 in. (27.3 × 40.6 cm) 

Cathy Lasry, New York 

MARY CASSATT 

A Goodnight Hug, 1880 

Pastel on brown paper laid down on board, 

16 9/16 x 24 3/4 in. (42 x 62.8 cm) 

MARY CASSATT 

Driving, 1881 

Oil on canvas, 35 5/16 × 51 3/8 in. (89.7 × 130.5 cm) 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 

Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, W1921-1-1 

MARY CASSATT 

Woman at Her Toilette, c. 1891 

Oil on canvas, approx. 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm) 

Private Collection 

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Mary Cassatt at Work, the first large-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in the U.S. in a quarter century. 

Pennsylvania-born and a celebrated member of the French Impressionists, Mary Cassatt built a groundbreaking career through hard work and artistic vision. For six decades, Cassatt was a committed, professional artist, making the social, intellectual, and working lives of modern women a core subject of her prints, paintings, and pastels.  She once wrote: “Oh the dignity of work, give me the chance of earning my own living, five francs a day and self-respect.”  

Mary Cassatt at Work presents over 130 of her works in various media to show her evolving practice as an artist and demonstrate her commitment to the “serious work” of artmaking. It presents new findings about her materials and working methods—which were advanced and radical for her era—based on detailed technical studies of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s significant Cassatt holdings.  

“Art was Mary Cassatt’s life’s purpose and living,” said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This exhibition will focus on Cassatt’s professionalism, her biography, and the wider Parisian world she inhabited.  It’s my hope that this exhibition will reshape contemporary conversations about gender, work, and artistic agency.”  

Mary Cassatt at Work features works from the PMA’s extensive collection, including some of Cassatt’s most celebrated paintings and prints, as well as loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Viginia Museum of Fine Arts, and private collections.

“We hope visitors come away with a sense of who Cassatt was and how carefully she constructed her identity as a working artist,” said curators Jennifer A. Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, and Laurel Garber, The Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings. “With this exhibition, we’ve sought to reexamine the full breadth of Cassatt’s art through the lens of her creative enterprise and draw attention to her commitment to ceaseless experimentation and bold techniques."

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Following its run at the PMA, this exhibition will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART - PMA

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.philamuseum.org

Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston @ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

November 14, 2021 – March 27, 2022

Pierre Auguste Renoir , Dance at Bougival, 1883, oil on canvas

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Picture Fund  © Museum of Fine Arts Boston, All Rights Reserved

© Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

For the first time, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), is lending some 100 of the most significant paintings and works on paper from its renowned Impressionist collection for an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, its only American venue. Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston traces the evolution of this 19th-century avant-garde movement, from its roots in the novel, naturalistic landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles Francois Daubigny, and other painters of the Barbizon School, to the early “optical color” experimentations in plein-air landscape painting by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro, to the frank depictions of modern urban life by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition highlights the artists’ relationships and their thoughts, in their own words, to underscore the philosophy behind this now world-renowned movement. 

“The MFA in Boston was the first museum in the U.S. to acquire a Degas, in 1903, and early patronage by pioneering Bostonian collectors ensured the growth of its now-extensive French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings,” commented Gary Tinterow, Director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, the MFAH. “This extraordinary collection has a distinctive capacity to narrate the history of French Impressionism with nuance, depth, and flare. We are enormously pleased to be able to share this rare selection here in Houston.”

The exhibition brings together the MFA’s 19th-century- and early-20th-century paintings, assembled in nine thematic groupings. An exhibition highlight is a breathtaking display of 15 canvases by Claude Monet, painted over a 30-year period, featuring Monet’s most beloved sites. Together, these paintings demonstrate the full scope of his immeasurable contribution to the Impressionist movement.

Additional works included are Claude Monet’s luminous Grainstack (Snow Effect), one of the artist’s famed series of 25 depictions of haystacks in varying seasons and light conditions, exhibited in May 1891 and purchased the following month by Bostonian Horatio Appleton Lamb; Edgar Degas’s empathic double portrait of his sister, Thérèse, and her husband, Edmondo Morbilli (about 1865), which remained with Degas, and then his descendants, until it was purchased by Boston collector Robert Treat Paine, 2nd; Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s life-size Dance at Bougival (1883), with its swirling evocation of modern café life; and Manet’s quintessentially urban portrait Street Singer (1862). (John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the patron who bequeathed this Manet to the MFA, Sarah Choate Sears, hangs in the American Paintings galleries of the MFAH.)

An integral aspect of the exhibition is a fascinating selection of works on paper showcasing the artists’ working processes. These prints, with concentrations of works by Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt, illuminate the artists’ working methods and approaches to their landscapes, portraits, and interiors, as part of a collaborative publication venture. Pissarro sought technical advice from Degas for his etching and aquatint of a favored woodland view. Edgar Degas’s painting Visit to a Museum (about 1879–90), from his series depicting women, including his friend and fellow Impressionist Mary Cassatt, in museum galleries, is accompanied by three prints from that series that portray Cassatt; four etching-and-aquatint prints from Cassatt’s own series In the Opera Box (about 1880) reveal the avid experimentation of her printmaking practice. 

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It has been curated by Katie Hanson, Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, and Julia Welch, Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is organized by Helga Aurisch, Curator, European Art. 

MFAH - THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005

Beck Building, Galleries 201–209

mfah.org

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist @ Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte + Other Venues

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist

Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte

Through January 2, 2022

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

Self Portrait, ca. 1890

Oil on canvas, 11 x 9 inches 

Private Collection

Courtesy of Martha Richardson Fine Art, Boston 

James Carroll Beckwith (American, 1852–1917)

Portrait of John Leslie Breck, 1891 

Oil on canvas, 13¼ x 17¼ inches

Collection of Max N. Berry

The Mint Museum presents the premiere of John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist, an exhibition showcasing more than 70 works by one of the first American artists to introduce Impressionism to the United States. The exhibition is the first ever organized by a museum to be dedicated to works by John Leslie Breck.

Drawn from public and private collections, as well as the acclaimed Terra Foundation collection of American art, many of the works have not been on public view in more than a century. In addition to John Leslie Breck’s landscape-inspired works, the exhibition highlights his exploration of new styles and approaches to painting in the years before his early death at the age of 38. More than 10 related paintings by John Leslie Breck’s French and American Impressionist colleagues, including Theodore Robinson, Willard Metcalf, and Lila Cabot Perry, are also featured in the exhibition.

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899) 

Chez M. Monet, 1888 

Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches 

Private Collection

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

Suzanne Hoschedé Sewing, 1888 

Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 21 7/8 inches. 

The Mint Museum, Gift of the Mint Museum Auxiliary and 

courtesy Heather James Fine Art. 2016.25

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

The Sketch Class, 1890

Oil on panel, 5¼ x 7 inches.

Private Collection

The exhibition is inspired by The Mint Museum’s acquisition of John Leslie Breck’s canvas Suzanne Hoschedé-Monet Sewing. “I have been an admirer of John Leslie Breck’s beautiful, trailblazing paintings ever since my first encounter with his work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the late 1990s,” says Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American art at The Mint Museum. “When we had the opportunity to acquire one for The Mint Museum in 2016, it was the perfect catalyst for the museum to begin organizing this exhibition — the first retrospective of his work since his death in 1899.”

“The importance of John Leslie Breck’s works and his introduction of French Impressionism to an American audience has largely gone unrecognized but is an important part of American art history,” says Todd A. Herman, PhD, president and CEO of The Mint Museum. “Through dedicated research and work by the staff at the Mint, Breck and his beautiful paintings will be brought back into the conversation of American art.”

In addition, a 208-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalogue is available. Stuhlman collaborated with leading Breck scholars Royal Leith and Jeffrey Brown to bring together Breck’s finest paintings, as well as to create the first ever monograph produced about the artist, which also includes contributions from Erica Hirshler, PhD, and Katherine Bourguignon, PhD. 

After debuting at The Mint Museum, John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist will travel to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee in the winter of 2022 and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa in the spring of 2022.

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist is generously presented by Bank of America, with additional support provided by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts and the Mint Museum Auxiliary. Individual support provided by Charlie and Susan Murray in honor of Welborn and Patty Alexander, and Mary and Dick Payne.

MINT MUSEUM UPTOWN

at Levine Center for the Arts

500 South Tryon Street, Charlotte, NC 28202

mintmuseum.org

Claude Monet Masterpiece @ McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Monet and Whistler in London

McNay Art Museum, San Antonio

Through January 23, 2022

Claude Monet

Charing Cross Bridge, brouillard, 1902

Oil on canvas

Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario

Gift of Ethel and Milton Harris, 1990 

Photograph © AGO

Bodies of water have long captured the imaginations of artists, particularly Claude Monet, who often explored the magical effects of light and atmosphere on water at different times of day. The McNay’s exhibition, Monet and Whistler in London, features rarely seen artworks from nine artists in the McNay Collection in conversation with a Claude Monet masterpiece reflecting the River Thames in England. 

On loan from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge, brouillard (1902) shows one of the major bridges over the 215-mile-long river and the Houses of Parliament in the distance. The artist accentuates the effect of fog as it diffuses sunlight into a soft, golden glow. Other artists were similarly fascinated with the unique atmospheric qualities of the Thames, including American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. His lithograph Early Morning on view in the exhibition shows how the famous London fog creates a symphony of subtle gray tonalities.

Additional artworks include James Tissot’s Les Deux Amis (Two Friends), which depicts one man bidding farewell to another at the dock’s edge—a scene inspired by the excitement and adventure of travel. Winslow Homer’s Perils of the Sea highlights the dangers of the deep as women anxiously await their husbands with a roiling sea in the background. Additional artists focus on waterways as important arteries of commerce and industry, like Joseph Pennell’s Sunset, from Williamsburg Bridge or Otto Kuhler’s The Valley of Work.

Monet and Whistler in London presents many of these artworks for the first time in years, including John Marin’s studies of the Brooklyn Bridge. This exhibition also includes a contemporary woodcut by Yvonne Jacquette. Jacquette’s Midtown Composite focuses primarily on the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but also reveals a tiny sliver of the East River.

Monet and Whistler in London is organized for the McNay Art Museum by Lyle W. Williams, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Curator of Modern Art.

McNay Art Museum

6000 N New Braufels Avenue, San Antonio, TX 78209

www.mcnayart.org

Julian Onderdonk @ San Antonio Museum of Art - Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape

Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape

San Antonio Museum of Art

January 20 - April 23, 2017

The San Antonio Museum of Art presents Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape. The exhibition explores the work of legendary San Antonio painter Julian Onderdonk, from views of the Long Island landscape to sweeping impressions of the Hill Country and the iconic Texas bluebonnet.

Born in San Antonio in 1882, Julian Onderdonk trained first with his father, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk (1851–1917), one of the city's most important early artists. Julian Onderdonk further studied in New York under American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, whose mantra that an artist should work outdoors and paint what he or she saw forever marked Julian's work. After returning to Texas in 1909, Julian Onderdonk found his life's calling. He portrayed the distinctive surroundings of his state at different times of day, in different atmospheric conditions, and at different times of year to the delight of collectors and critics. Just as he reached the peak of his fame, his sudden death, at age 40, in 1922, cut his career short.

"Julian Onderdonk's work still influences the way visitors revere—and artists paint—the Texas landscape," said Dr. William Keyse Rudolph, Andrew W. Mellon Chief Curator and the Marie and Hugh Halff Curator of American Art. "It is exciting to share over two dozen works with the public, many of which are from private collections."

The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

JULIAN ONDERDONK. A CATALOGUE RAISONNE

Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape coincides with the publication of 

Julian Onderdonk: A Catalogue Raisonné 

by Harry A. Halff and Elizabeth Halff, 

who spent twenty years tracking down the works.

SAMA - SAN ANTONIO MUSEUM OF ART

200 West Jones Avenue, San Antonio, TX 78215

www.samuseum.org

Pennsylvania Impressionism at Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin

Earth, River, and Light: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism
Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI
February 7 - April 10, 2004

Two exhibitions of American Impressionist paintings – one featuring historic works of Pennsylvania Impressionism, the other focusing on contemporary works from the Mid-Atlantic region – open February 7 at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum.

Earth, River, and Light: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism includes 47 works by a diverse collection of artists who became known collectively as the Pennsylvania Impressionists. The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of this important 20th century American art movement that was fueled by a passion to capture on canvas the dynamic effects of light and atmosphere on the environment.

American Impressionism was firmly rooted in the American soil. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, artists increasingly spurned cities, preferring instead to live and work in the numerous art colonies that sprang up throughout the country. One of the best known of these colonies began in 1898 on the banks of the Delaware River north of Philadelphia, in the picturesque Bucks County village of New Hope. Here, artists found an ample supply of "painting-ready" bucolic settings featuring streams, pastures, quarries, farmhouse, and colonial villages.

The Pennsylvania Impressionists played a dominant role in the American art world of the teens and twenties. Their work was celebrated for its freedom from European influence and was praised as being the first truly national artistic expression. Many of the artists both studied and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and their stylistic roots hearkened back to the "Academy Realism" practiced by Thomas Eakins.

Edward Redfield (1969-1965), generally acknowledged as the stylistic leader of the New Hope painters, passionately believed that the vitality of a place could only be captured by an artist whose senses were actively engaged. Painters had to see, hear, smell, feel, and even taste what they put on their canvases. To accomplish this, he often endured great physical hardships while making his famous snow scenes, sometimes standing for hours in knee-deep snow with his canvas strapped to a tree.

Edward Redfield’s vigorously realistic, unsentimental brand of Impressionism influenced several generations of artists. However, what most characterized Pennsylvania Impressionism was not a single, unified style, but rather the emergence of many mature distinctive voices: Daniel Garber’s luminous, poetic renditions of the Delaware River; Fern Coppedge’s colorful village scenes; Robert Spencer’s Ashcan School-influenced views of mills and tenements; John Fulton Folinsbee’s moody snowscapes; and William L. Lathrop’s deeply felt, evocative Bucks County vistas.

Earth, River, and Light: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism is organized by the James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and is curated by Brian H. Peterson. The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication on Pennsylvania Impressionism, principally authored by Peterson.

As a complement to Earth, River, and Light, Woodson Art Museum curator Andrew McGivern has organized an exhibition of contemporary works by artists who are carrying on the traditions of the Pennsylvania Impressionists. "Sunlight and Shadow" presents 24 works by 11 members of the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association. Like their predecessors, they, too, find endless inspiration in subjects bathed in natural light and enjoy the challenge of painting quickly outdoors in the face of changing atmospheric conditions. The group’s mission is to promote an appreciation of and participation in the art of outdoor painting.

LEIGH YAWKEY WOODSON ART MUSEUM
700 North 12th Street [Franklin and 12th Streets], Wausau, Wisconsin 54403-5007
www.lywam.org

Childe Hassam at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh - Prints and Drawings from the Collection

Childe Hassam: Prints and Drawings from the Collection 

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

October 4, 2003 - February 8, 2004

Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935), the best-known American painter in the Impressionist style, began his artistic career in his native Boston, working first as a wood-engraver, then as an illustrator, and eventually established himself as a painter of city life. Childe Hassam began to paint in the Impressionist style after he visited Paris between 1887 and 1889. In his paintings, he portrayed life in urban America, primarily his winter home of New York City, and the country landscapes of New England, where he spent his summers. Although Childe Hassam did not consider himself an Impressionist, his paintings and drawings are as filled with color and sunlight as the works of the French painters who inspired him.

In 1915, Childe Hassam took up printmaking–first etching and later lithography. Over the course of his career, Childe Hassam produced some 375 etchings and 42 lithographs. His earliest prints reflect his interest in the effect of light on objects in the landscape. As he achieved technical mastery as a printmaker, his approach became bolder and more decorative. He exploited the inherent contrast between black ink and white paper to emphasize light and shadow.

Linda Batis, associate curator of fine arts, said "The drawings on view in the exhibition reveal Hassam's natural affinity for the graphic arts as a way to explore color and pictorial structure. They provide insight into a fundamental fact about Hassam's work. He drew and painted what he saw before him."

Childe Hassam enjoyed a long relationship with Carnegie Museum of Art and John Beatty, the museum's first director. Between 1896 and 1935, Childe Hassam exhibited more than 90 paintings at several Carnegie Internationals, the museum's recurring exhibition of contemporary art. He served on the exhibition's Jury of Award in 1903, 1904, and 1910, the year he was also honored with a solo exhibition of paintings. With the purchase of Fifth Avenue in Winter in 1900, Carnegie Museum became the first American museum to acquire one of Childe Hassam's paintings. In 1907, John Beatty purchased 30 drawings from the artist, one of the largest such groups in any museum collection. The etchings and lithographs on view are from a group of 60 prints donated to the museum by the artist's widow in 1940 in recognition of the close relationship between Childe Hassam and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Childe Hassam: Prints and Drawings from the Collection includes 72 drawings, etchings and paintings. Many of the drawings on view were studies for some of Childe Hassam's most notable paintings. Replicas of some of these are on view alongside the drawings to give visitors a sense of the correlation between the study and the final work. Correspondence between Childe Hassam and John Beatty, which reveals a friendship based on mutual enthusiasm for art, are also on view as part of the exhibition.

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART

4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

www.cmoa.org

Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890
The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
June 17 - September 9, 2001

Spontaneous, "unfinished," and seemingly painted before a fleeting scene, the works of the Impressionists were originally hailed and condemned as a radical challenge to art. The revolutionary import of these now-familiar paintings might be summed up by the title of the work that gave the movement its name-Impression: Sunrise by Claude Monet, shown in 1874 at what became known as the first Impressionist exhibition. Since then, hundreds (if not thousands) of exhibitions have been devoted to Impressionism and its principal figures--yet none has brought together the various paintings that might be called "Impressions."

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has assembled just these works--and taken a closer look at what was most daring about a revolutionary art movement--in the exhibition Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890. The exhibition presents 77 paintings by the artists most closely associated with Impressionism (Monet, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley); by notable precursors (Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Honoré Daumier, Théodore Rousseau); and by a major successor, Vincent van Gogh.

Organized by the Clark Art Institute in association with the National Gallery, London, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Impression has already been hailed as "a highly important show" by the International Herald Tribune. The exhibition is curated by Richard R. Brettell, a leading international scholar of early modern art, who is Professor of Aesthetic Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Brettell conceived the exhibition, wrote the catalogue (published by Yale University Press) and selected the works, which are drawn from more than fifty public and private collections in Europe and the United States, including the Clark's own renowned holdings.

"We have seen so many Impressionist paintings so many times that we have all but forgotten the risks that their makers took," notes Richard R. Brettell. "This exhibition proposes an experiment in looking, which focuses on the most radical but least-understood aspect of Impressionism: the evidence of the painter's hand, as seen in works that appear to be rapid transcriptions of shifting subjects. We bring together these works in the belief that the most benignly attractive movement in western painting deserves to retrieve a little of the oomph that it had in the 19th century."

"This exhibition includes many of the most beautiful and evocative 'Impressions' painted in France over three decades of the late 19th century," states Michael Conforti, Director of the Clark Art Institute. "But, more to the point, it returns our attention to the qualities in these paintings that were most vital, and to some most threatening. By re-examining these works in their technical as well as thematic dimensions, the exhibition recaptures an essential characteristic of Impressionist painting--the seductive charm of speed--and makes a fundamental new contribution to the study of this crucial movement."

What Is an "Impression"?

The "Impression," as defined by Brettell, was not necessarily painted quickly, but it was done in such a way as to look quick. Painted directly--worked on the canvas without preparatory processes or intermediate steps--these pictures boasted of the artist's spontaneity. They also suggested an accord between the time span represented in the picture and the time that the artist had spent painting. Among the most celebrated examples--on loan from The Art Institute of Chicago--is Manet's 1864 The Races at Longchamps, in which the rapid gestures of the painter's hand portray a horse race that rushes headlong at the viewer, and is finished in an instant.

As Richard R. Brettell points out, Manet courted "an aesthetic of beautiful gestures and elegant construction," which had its roots in the art of Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, van Dyck, Hals, Fragonard, and Delacroix. His canvases boast of a masterful fluency of hand. By contrast, the Impressionists who were Manet's followers were derided in their own time for the seeming awkwardness of their work. They "made paintings that strain to hold together in the midst of a virtual chaos of gestures," Richard R.Brettell says. "For Monet, Sisley, Morisot, and Renoir, the beauty of the painted mark was not of primary importance. Rather, the urgency and sheer energy of its application were more important than elegance." This "aesthetic of the Impression" was soon taken up in extreme form by van Gogh, whose works have had "a unique ability to engender other powerful vanguard forms of action painting," from Fauvism to German Expressionism to the works of the New York School.

Tour and Catalogue

Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890 was first exhibited at the National Gallery, London (November 2000-January 2001) and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (March-May 2001). The exhibition is presented in North America only at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

When first shown at the National Gallery, Impression was hailed by Richard Dorment of The Daily Telegraph as "the show of the year." Philip Hensher, writing in The Mail on Sunday, described Impression as "sublime," saying "it looks to me very much like the best Impressionist exhibition I have ever seen;" and Souren Melikian of The International Herald Tribune found Impression to be a "highly important show," offering a "drastically new approach to the understanding of Impressionism."

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the same title, published by Yale University Press in association with the Clark Art Institute. The 240-page book, illustrated by 115 images in color and 65 in black-and-white, features a text by Richard R. Brettell with individual chapters on the Impression in 1874; performative painting and the intellectual origins of the Impression; Manet and performative painting; Monet and the development of the Impression; Morisot, Renoir and the sketch aesthetic; Sisley and graphism; Degas and the Impression; Caillebotte and Pissarro; and van Gogh.

Impression and the Clark Art Institute

Richard R. Brettell developed the exhibition Impression and wrote the catalogue during a residency at the Clark Art Institute. As one of the first participants in the Clark's Visiting Scholars program (now called the Clark Fellows), he was at the Clark in summer 1997, giving a seminar on "Reading Individual Works of Art" and completing his work on the Oxford History of Modern Art. He has been a frequent participant in research and academic programs at the Clark.

The Clark Art Institute has drawn on both its strengths, as a museum and a research center, in organizing Impression. Over the past decade, the Clark has earned a reputation for developing exhibitions with both broad public appeal and a basis in challenging and original scholarship. Among them have been Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent; Drawn Into the Light: Jean-François Millet; Degas and the Little Dancer; and Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930. Many of these exhibitions, like Impression, incorporate important works from the Clark's renowned collection.

THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE
225 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267
www.clarkart.edu

Recovered Pissarro Painting at Worcester Art Museum

Worcester Art Museum Acquires Recovered Pissarro Painting

The Worcester Art Museum has acquired Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny a Dieppe, Temps Gris (Harbor at Dieppe), a painting by Camille Pissarro, which was formerly owned by Worcester philanthropists Robert and Helen Stoddard. The Museum will acquire this important French Impressionist work through the Stoddard Acquisition Fund, which is used solely for purchasing art.

Once it arrives at the Worcester Art Museum, the painting will undergo a conservation treatment in preparation for Pissarro and Other Masters: The Stoddard Legacy, which will open in February 2000. This show will feature the Pissarro and other works that once hung in the Stoddard home, as well as the art the Museum purchased in the last two decades with proceeds from the Stoddard Acquisition Fund. After the Stoddard Charitable Trust established this sizeable fund in 1979, the Museum was able to add significantly to its permanent collection many distinguished works of art ranging from a 17th-century portrait by Dutch master Frans Hals, to a vibrant genre scene by Jacob Lawrence, the most noted 20th-century African American artist.

"Helen and Robert Stoddard were great lovers of art and had a wonderful relationship with the Worcester Art Museum starting in the 1940s," says James A. Welu, director of the Worcester Art Museum. "In addition to their great leadership and extensive volunteer efforts, they enabled us to acquire many fine works of art over the years, and we are extremely grateful for their friendship and generosity. I am particularly pleased that Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny Dieppe, Temps Gris will be added to the permanent collection of the Worcester Art Museum, which was the wish of Mrs. Stoddard." This painting, which dates from 1902, joins an earlier work by Pissarro, L'ille Lacroix à Rouen, which was painted in 1873 and came to the Museum through the estate of Robert W. Stoddard.

Stole from the Stoddard's Worcester home in 1978, Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny Dieppe, Temps Gris was lost for two decades. After the theft, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company reimbursed the Stoddards for their loss. On October 22, 1998, the FBI seized the painting from Wolf's Auction Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time of the seizure, the painting was about to be sold after Ohio businessman Daniel Zivko and Kenneth Bement had consigned it to the gallery. On April 8, 1999, Zivko, Bement, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, the Stoddard estate, and the Worcester Art Museum settled the matter in a Cleveland court cast. The decision will result in the painting coming to the Worcester Art Museum for its permanent collection.

French Impressionism was a favorite of the Stoddards, who collected other masters from this school, including Renoir and Sisley. Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny Dieppe, Temps Gris hung over the Stoddard's mantle piece from 1951 to 1978. After the theft of this painting, the Stoddards acquired several other pictures, including Pissarro's L'ille Lacroix à Rouen, which took the treasured spot over the mantlepiece. Both of these Pissarro paintings will now hang together for the first time ever, at the Worcester Art Museum.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), was a prolific artist, creating more than 1,800 paintings in his lifetime. Born to a Jewish family in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, Pissarro attended boarding school in the suburbs of Paris where the headmaster encouraged his artistic talents. After working in the family business for a short time, Pissarro returned to Paris in 1855 to pursue an artistic career. He had a strong and deliberate style that featured a highly disciplined method of working, including a light palette and a varied application of paint.

Known as the "patriarch of French Impressionism," Pissarro was a moral and artistic role model to many of the famous French Impressionists, including Renoir, Monet, and Sisley. Pissarro had a particularly strong influence on Cézanne and Gauguin.

A peaceful but committed renegade, Pissarro helped organize the eight French Impressionist exhibitions in protest of the official Salon. He was the only member of the Impressionists to participate in all eight of these exhibitions. His style was called simple and naïeve by some, but always honest. His was devoted to artistic truth and his fellow men.

In 1886-87, Pissarro joined the ranks of the Neo-Impressionists and took up the pointillist technique (separating colors into little dots). This led to the estrangement of his critics and admirers. He returned to Impressionism and once again painted rural scenes and cityscapes, such as the painting the Worcester Art Museum recently acquired.

Camille Pissarro sold few paintings during his lifetime. He lost nearly 1,500 paintings representing 20 years of work during the Franco-Prussian War, adding to his financial dilemma. To support his wife and eight children, Pissarro tried other artistic pursuits such as painting fans, blinds and shop signs, as well as making etchings.

Camille Pissarro's writings, including his many letters to his son Lucien, are one of the most important documents on the beliefs of the Impressionists. His letters also reveal a great deal about his own personal aspirations. In one of his letters to Lucien, Pissarro wrote: "Painting, art in general, is what enchants me - it is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits."

The Worcester Art Museum is honored to add Camille Pissarro's Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny Dieppe, Temps Gris to its permanent collection in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Stoddard.

Worcester Art Museum

Worcester, Mass.

www.worcester.org