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EARTH, RIVER, AND LIGHT: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism
June 28 – September 28, 2003

Krieble Gallery

The Florence Griswold Museum is proud to be the first venue for a nationally touring exhibition of Pennsylvania Impressionism organized by the James A. Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown, PA. Earth, River, and Light: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism showcases forty-seven rarely seen paintings from public and private collections and presents a comprehensive survey of this important art movement. The exhibition is complemented by selected paintings by Connecticut Impressionist artists of the same time period from the collection of the Florence Griswold Museum.
Funding for the exhibition in Old Lyme is supported by

The exhibition is circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, California. The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication, Pennsylvania Impressionism, produced by the Michener Art Museum and principally authored by Brian H. Peterson with essays by Sylvia Yount and William Gerdts. It is available for purchase in the Florence Griswold Museum Shop.

THE BIRTH OF AN ART COLONY
"Bucks County was a place where an independent, self-sufficient man could make a living from the land, bring up a family and still have the freedom to paint as he saw fit." -- Artist, Edward Redfield

If you happen to encounter something beautiful in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, chances are an artist has been there before you, and somewhere you will find a painting or a drawing that conveys the artist’s thoughts and feelings about the place. Artists often want to live and work in areas that inspire them, and in Bucks County the main source of inspiration has always been the region’s picturesque pastures, streams, quarries, farmhouses, and colonial villages. But there were other reasons why visual artists went there. Many appreciated the convenient location, close to New York City and Philadelphia. Some followed in the footsteps of respected teachers and friends. Others were drawn to the atmosphere of tolerance that is rooted in the county’s Quaker tradition.

While Bucks County was home to a number of important artists earlier in the 19th century, the real story began in 1898, when two nationally known landscape painters arrived there: Edward Redfield and William L. Lathrop. Their presence attracted other artists, and within a few years an art colony began to form along the banks of the Delaware River, centered in the village of New Hope. Like Redfield and Lathrop, many of these artists had prominent careers, and they came to be known for a style of landscape painting called Pennsylvania Impressionism.

EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM
Impressionism was born in France in the 1860s and ’70s when a group of rebellious landscape painters began to exhibit canvases that, to the conventional eye, seemed crude and unfinished. Now-familiar figures like Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir shocked the Parisian art world with their use of bright colors and sketchy, spontaneous brushwork. Soon the style caught on, and by the 1880s and ’90s numerous young American painters were journeying to France to learn the new techniques. Some of these artists even established an American "colony" at Monet’s famous home in Giverny, where they apprenticed themselves to the elder master and, later, brought his ideas back to America.

It could be said that there were as many Impressionist styles as there were Impressionist painters. However, both the European and American painters developed certain recognizable habits. Usually these artists worked out of doors, in direct contact with their subject matter. They were especially fascinated with light and sometimes went to great lengths to ensure the basic accuracy of the appearance of light and shadow at specific times of day. They developed complex color schemes based on the latest scientific theories about color and perception. Some Impressionists also had a romantic side to their personalities and loved to portray idealized feminine figures wearing frilly dresses, sitting in fanciful gardens.

PENNSYLVANIA IMPRESSIONISM
When you think of Impressionist painting, the first words that enter your mind are probably not "virile," "force," and "veracity." But these were the very words employed by early-20th-century critics to describe the work of Edward Redfield and his Bucks County compatriots, who were praised for creating a style of Impressionism that was free of French influence and firmly rooted in the American soil. Boston Impressionists, by contrast, often depicted ornate interiors and well-dressed society ladies; the same critics described these artists as "aristocrats" obsessed with "parlor manners." From the beginning, then, the Pennsylvania painters were associated with a vigorous realism, grounded in love of the land and embodying America’s populist, pioneer spirit.

While these ideas may accurately describe the work of Redfield and his likeminded colleagues, the best known of the Bucks County painters developed their own mature styles, which are relatively easy to recognize. The term "Pennsylvania Impressionism" can be thought of as a kind of large umbrella that sheltered numerous distinctive voices, with Redfield and his followers at its center.

M. Elizabeth Price, Cheerful Barge 269, c. 1910

ARTISTS AND THE LAND
Many artists make their best work when they feel a sense of connection with a particular place, especially landscape painters, who often fall in love with an area and spend their whole lives obsessively exploring its every detail. The great French painter Paul Cézanne, for example, made dozens of renditions of a single mountain near his home, and Cézanne’s colleague Claude Monet made countless versions of the gardens, footbridges, and lily ponds at his famous home in Giverny. In Bucks County, Daniel Garber first transformed his property by remodeling the barn, making a beautiful pond, and designing new outbuildings. Like Monet, he then used his home as a subject for some of his most celebrated paintings.

There are times when a whole group of artists will set down roots in the same spot and then begin to influence one another’s work. Through this process an art colony is born. In France in the 1840s, a colony that came to be known as the Barbizon School settled in the forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris. In America, colonies associated with the Impressionist style flourished in such far-flung places as Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, New Mexico, and South Carolina. Often these groups were led by dynamic artist-teachers who had national reputations. The colorful story of the New Hope art colony was repeated throughout the country, as artists who felt the call of landscape painting found inspiration in places they loved.

William Lathrop, The Bonfire, c.1921

WILL AND ANNIE LATHROP
Almost every Sunday afternoon, weather permitting, they congregated on the lawn of the Lathrops’ house; artists, family members, and visitors alike—all were welcome as the English-born Mrs. Annie Lathrop served her legendary tea. William Lathrop had moved his family to Bucks County in 1899, and within a few years their home at Phillips Mill became the favorite gathering place for a group of young landscape painters and their friends. It was both Mrs. Lathrop’s tea and Mr. Lathrop’s popular art classes that brought people to the area. Often the genial painter would meet his students at the train station in nearby New Hope, then ferry them up the Delaware Canal (in his boat, Sunshine) to a favorite painting spot along the river.

Two other figures were instrumental in the formation of the art colony, Edward Redfield and Daniel Garber. While Redfield did little teaching and didn’t like to think of himself as a member of a group, his reputation alone helped to put Bucks County "on the map." Garber was both a major artist and a highly respected teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; many of his students followed him up the Delaware River to paint and, eventually, to live. But it was Will and Annie Lathrop who deserved the most credit for nurturing this loosely knit group of artists. As one friend said of Mrs. Lathrop after her death in 1935, "She sewed on [the artists’] buttons, darned their stockings, taught them to cook, in fact did everything for them except bear their babies. In her great heart they found comfort. In her strength they found a refuge."

GARBER AND THE PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY
The rich history of the visual arts in Bucks County simply would not have occurred without the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Beginning with Thomas Hicks in the late 1830s and continuing to the present day, nearly all of the area’s most significant artists either studied, taught, or regularly exhibited at the Academy. And it was the Academy’s emphasis on grounding its students in the ancient crafts of drawing and painting that provided the foundation of the Pennsylvania Impressionist style. The two best-known Bucks County painters—Edward Redfield and Daniel Garber—studied at "PAFA," and their influence guided several successive generations of regional artists away from the modernist, abstract style and toward the more conservative mindset known as Academy Realism.

Garber was also one of the Pennsylvania Academy’s most revered teachers. It was often said that there were only two kinds of students at the school: those interested in modern art who ended up in France, and the rest who "went up the Delaware." Garber taught at the Academy for forty-one years, and his prominent role as a defender of traditional aesthetic values caused one of his students to remark that he was "the strong and steady center of the school." He was also admired for his skills as a painter, as evidenced by the following verse, found on the men’s room wall at the school shortly before he retired: "Barns are painted by fools like me, but only Garber can paint a tree."

REDFIELD AND "PLEIN AIR" PAINTING
Nowadays it’s hard to imagine life without the lowly toothpaste tube. But the flexible metal storage tube was not in common use until the 1840s, and it revolutionized both the art of tooth brushing and the art of oil painting. The paint tube freed artists from the burden of mixing their own colors and storing paint in clumsy, inefficient animal bladders. Painters were no longer limited to making simple charcoal sketches out of doors—they could now assemble a small, portable painting "kit" and create finished canvases outside the studio, in direct contact with nature. French painters such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot pioneered this concept, which came to be known by its French name, en plein air, or "open air," painting.

Practically all of the Pennsylvania Impressionists were enthusiastic about plein air painting, especially Edward Redfield, who passionately believed that the essential vitality of a place could only be captured by an artist whose senses were actively engaged. To Redfield, painters had to see, hear, smell, feel, and even taste what they put on their canvases, as well as create an entire painting in one sitting or, as he said, "at one go." To accomplish this, he often endured tremendous physical hardships while making his famous snow scenes. Sometimes he stood for hours at a time in knee-deep snow; during winter storms he strapped his canvas to a tree.

THE END OF PENNSYLVANIA IMPRESSIONISM
When the Pennsylvania Impressionist painters became famous in the early 1900s, they were actually considered somewhat avant-garde. Redfield, Garber, and Lathrop won countless awards in these years, and they were often jurors for exhibitions around the country. The peak of the movement probably occurred in 1915 at the prestigious Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, where several Bucks County artists won important medals and Redfield was honored with an entire room devoted to his canvases. The seeds of the school’s demise, however, had already been planted. In 1913, a group of young artists organized the International Exposition of Modern Art at the 69th Regimental Armory in New York City. Known simply as the Armory Show, this exhibit was the American public’s first exposure to European abstract art.
While this highly controversial show was reviled in the newspapers (the artists were called "madmen"), it forever changed the way art was made in America. Styles such as Pennsylvania Impressionism came to be seen as quaint and backward looking. The Armory Show also firmly established New York as the center of the American art world, and since many of the Bucks County painters were more associated with Philadelphia, their work received less and less attention. Finally, during the 1930s many artists turned to socially conscious art in response to the widespread suffering brought on by the Depression. Pennsylvania Impressionism was discredited and largely forgotten in the art world until the 1980s and ’90s, when both scholars and the general public began to rediscover the depth and consummate skill of these earlier masters of landscape painting.

CONNECTICUT COMPARISONS
Throughout the exhibition Connecticut Impressionism from the Florence Griswold Museum's collection is intersperesed with the Pennsylvania art to compare and contrast the artists' styles and subjects.

The professional lives of the Pennsylvania and Connecticut Impressionists revolved around Philadelphia and New York City respectively. It is not surprising, then, that these artists turned their attention to depicting the city. Van Roekens’ Towers in the Mist shows a rainy view of City Hall in downtown Philadelphia, while Wiggins depicts a snowstorm on Washington’s Birthday in New York City, with flags flying in celebration of the holiday. The vertical format of Van Roekens’ painting emphasizes the tall urban buildings, but Wiggins uses a nearly square format for his composition, a format that a number of the Connecticut Impressionists used for their country landscapes.