More than 125 years after pioneering American artist Theodore Robinson moved next door to the great French Impressionist painter Claude Monet in the village of Giverny, there’s no doubt about the lasting impact of the hybrid visual sensibility that became known as American Impressionism.
No artistic movement was more popular in the United States after two ground-breaking exhibits of work by the French originators of the school appeared in Boston and New York in the 1880s. And for some 30 years afterward, American painters and their public pursued this new blend of loose brushwork, vivid color, commonplace subjects and distinctive personal visions with a passion that has seldom been equaled.
Just how pervasive and accomplished this aesthetic impulse became within a very short time can easily be forgotten, however, after the century-long succession of art “isms” that followed.