About the Exhibition
Immerse yourself in beautiful works by artists who pioneered not only a new way of painting but a new way to see the world.
Full of lovely European vistas and romantic American scenes, Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism presents a panorama of progressive landscape painting from the last half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. This exquisite exhibition features 40 luminous pictures that are among the Brooklyn Museum’s finest impressionist works of art.
Chronicling the evolution of open-air painting in 19th-century France to its influence on early-20th-century American artists, the exhibition includes major works by leading French artists Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Courbet, Charles Daubigny, and many of their acclaimed American peers, including John Singer Sargent and Childe Hassam.
The New Landscape
Impressionism was the culmination and conclusion of a century of art dominated by landscape painting. The celebrated style owed much to the aesthetic explorations of the preceding generations of French landscape painters. In the mid-19th century, landscape painting veered away from idealized conceptions of nature, as painters reached for a freer interpretation of the natural world.
Among the earliest works in the exhibition are Charles Daubigny’s The River Seine at Mantes (about 1856) and Gustave Courbet’s Isolated Rock (about 1862), which reveal the impact of plein-air sketching practice on landscape art of the period. Members of the so-called Barbizon school of French landscape painting, Daubigny, Courbet, and others were known for their open-air preparatory sketches, in which they recorded in quick dabs of color the changing qualities of light and air. These sketches subsequently informed the larger and more carefully designed paintings completed in the artists’ studios.
The Impressionists
Heirs to the open-air tradition of the Barbizon school, the impressionists strove to capture fleeting moments in time by showing the influence of light on subjects. Their highly elaborated “impressions” were seemingly spontaneous, rapidly executed landscapes. For instance, Monet, the most prominent of the impressionists, would position himself before his subject for hours over a series of days, substituting one canvas for another as dictated by changing light and atmosphere.
Influence on American Artists
The siren call of this new landscape art attracted painters from all over Europe but especially from the United States. Beginning in the mid-19th century, many American painters went to Paris seeking to improve their skills and find inspiration. They attended French art academies and frequented the painting locations made famous by their Barbizon and impressionist predecessors.
The majority of American works in the exhibition depict American locales and demonstrate the eagerness of these artists to further develop their new style back home. This led to the appearance in their work of American beaches, factories, and cityscapes distinguished by brilliant colors and lively, broken brushwork, including Julian Alden Weir’s Willimantic Thread Factory (1893) and Willard Leroy Metcalf’s Early Spring Afternoon, Central Park (1911).
Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism offers more than the opportunity to follow the evolution of a celebrated art style. Each of the pictures in the show conveys the pure joy of seeing things anew.
This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum. At the NCMA the exhibition is also made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.
At the NCMA Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism is presented by RBC Centura, AT&T, and UNC Healthcare/Rex.