American Impressionism

The word Impressionism has long been associated 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 theatre. 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, and 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 labourers 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 of the treatment of the theme of work, drawing on such diverse sources as poetry, popular songs, census reports and home-economics books.