OLD LYME, CONN.- The year 2024 marks the 150th anniversary of the first exhibition in France by the group of artists we now call Impressionists. Thirty-one painters, including Claude Monet, Édgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, and Alfred Sisley, claimed independence from the official government-sponsored exhibition known as the Salon. As the historic site of the Lyme Art Colony and considered the home of American Impressionism, the FloGris Museum is uniquely qualified to celebrate this anniversary. The exhibition Impressionism 150: From Paris to Connecticut and Beyond, on view June 1 through September 8, 2024, uses over 50 works from the Museum’s collection to commemorate the French artists' break with the past and illustrate how American artists embraced the movement and translated the style to aesthetics that would be well received in the United States. The exhibition traces the style's fate as European abstraction re-shaped American art after 1913. Disregarded for decades, Impressionism attracted revived interest beginning in the 1970s-1980s, eventually reaching blockbuster status. Currently, there is scholarship on American Impressionism being done that points toward its ongoing relevance today.

Americans who traveled to France between the mid 1870s and early 1900s took note of avant-garde movements such as Impressionism but were not instantly inspired to convert. Rather they developed a gradual and steady identification with modern Paris and its art offerings. Like French Impressionists, American artists roamed the boulevards, parks, and museums observing fashionable people and capturing informal sketches directly from the world around them. The freedom they felt to step outside traditions of academic figure drawing prepared many future Impressionists to leave Paris entirely to explore the possibilities of landscape painting outdoors at France’s rural artist colonies.

In the country, away from Paris's competitive ateliers and juried exhibitions, artists felt freer to try out new approaches during long summer days at portable easels set up en plein air. Artist colonies in locales such as Barbizon, Concarneau, Pont-Aven, Grez sur Loing, and Giverny played a key role in Impressionism's flourishing and duration. There, inexpensive inns and the comfortable presence of friends fostered artists' experimentation. Each rural colony held particular attractions, ranging from the availability of country people as models, access to fields and woods, aesthetically appealing architecture, and the chance to paint in proximity—as one could in Giverny—to French Impressionists like Claude Monet.

More than any other colony, the Giverny experience inspired generations of artists from around the world who translated Impressionism to American shores and beyond. It provided an important model for art colony life as a means of obtaining access to nature in all its diversity, and to the companionable interchanges that fostered creativity. In 1885, Willard Metcalf was one of the first American artists to visit Giverny, a date known from notations on some of the bird eggs in his naturalist cabinet, on view in the exhibition. Throughout his time in France, Metcalf was finding his way artistically. Depending on the locale and the artistic company, he worked in what a journalist called “soft, French gray-day atmosphere” (as in Spring Study à Grez), or lush greens “as varied as they are true” (as in The Eel Trap), both works are on view in the exhibition. American newspaper accounts of expat artists’ works reveal the fine balance Metcalf and others had to strike in pleasing both themselves and potential patrons back home who were not yet fans of Impressionism.

Between the 1870s and the 1890s, artists gradually translated Impressionism to America, which is demonstrated in the exhibition through the presence of art in which traditional academic methods are blended with new approaches to color, light, and subject matter. In 1897, Metcalf, John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, and other Impressionist painters followed in the footsteps of their French predecessors when they quit New York's conservative Society of American Artists and founded The Ten American Painters to exhibit their work without juries or restrictions. Although French Impressionism had been introduced to American audiences a decade earlier, critics still bridled at what they felt was a "radical" approach by Twachtman and fellow members of The Ten. Inspired by their French experiences, artists replicated in Old Lyme, Cos Cob, Gloucester, Monhegan, and beyond the art colony settings that nurtured aesthetic transformation.

In Old Lyme, where Florence Griswold hosted artists in her boardinghouse between 1899 and 1937, artists enjoyed a varied landscape as well as a collegial atmosphere. Childe Hassam’s arrival in 1903, the year he sketched Chestnut Trees, Old Lyme, Connecticut in pastel on blue paper to suggest the effects of stark sunlight, made Old Lyme a magnet for Impressionists, a reputation it has never lost.

Those who knew artist Matilda Browne recalled how rapidly she worked when painting outdoors, able to easily complete examples like Blossoming Flowers on River's Edge in one sitting. Women artists in Browne's day were stereotyped as copyists, which she defied by choosing a plein-air landscape subject over a still life composed in the studio. Only by tramping out to the riverbank with her paintbox and easel could she have captured the sunlight as well as the color and texture of the blossoms, which may be the short-lived drifts of mountain laurel that flowered around Old Lyme late each spring. The New York Tribune’s critic praised Browne as a “painter descending… from the Impressionists in curiosity before color truths… Her vision is joyous.”

Over the past decade, the study of art history has evolved along with other areas of contemporary society to be increasingly mindful of topics like equal rights, accessibility, and environmental conservation. While American Impressionist pictures are largely celebrated for their beauty and optimism, scholars today are reframing their interpretations to consider the legacies of colonization on the visual arts, including histories of discrimination, land ownership, and white privilege. Museums seek inclusive approaches to interpreting the past in a rapidly changing and often polarized world. Art historians are undertaking interdisciplinary collaborations with experts outside the humanities, such as with geologists and biologists, to broaden their analyses and present a variety of viewpoints on Impressionist pictures. Impressionism 150 closes with a group of paintings that focus on race, gender, and the environment to demonstrate the vast potential for understanding the picturesque works with fresh eyes.

While this major anniversary will be celebrated by exhibitions at the Musée d’Orsay / National Gallery of Art in Washington, no one show can encompass Impressionism’s simultaneously global reach and regional specificity. At the FloGris Museum, Impressionism 150 centers the discussion in the very place the genre blossomed in America and continues to thrive. After they explore the exhibition visitors can walk the same grounds that Hassam and Metcalf captured on canvas as well as discover the historic boardinghouse where the artists stayed and enjoyed fellowship and inspiration.