Lasting Impressions

When Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Renoir and a handful of other artists — most of them French — began to abandon the formal rules that had dominated painting until the mid-19th century, they brought into the art world a new spontaneity, luminosity and richness. Their revolutionary way of looking at landscapes, gardens and scenes of leisure had particular resonance in a distant land that, a century earlier, embraced some revolutionary French ideas about politics. “I hated conventional art,” said Mary Cassatt, a leading American artist of the 19th and 20th centuries. “When I joined the Impressionists, I began to live.”

Cassatt was not alone. By the late 1870s Impressionism was already an established movement in France. American painters were flocking there to embrace the new style, blending European approaches and techniques with their own influences and vision. Cassatt and her contemporaries — including John Leslie Breck, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, Theodore Robinson — created a style known as American Impressionism, which remains largely unknown in Europe. Now the Hermitage Foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland is offering a rare glimpse at 59 paintings created from 1880 to 1915 by 33 American Impressionists; some of the works have never been seen on this side of the Atlantic.

Though individual styles varied, American Impressionists tended to retain more structure and realism in their work, favoring strong contours that gave their paintings a more emphatic expression. Many of the artists featured at the Hermitage .ocked to Giverny, a picturesque French village where Monet lived and worked from 1883 to 1926 and where the painter’s legendary landscaped gardens provided inspiration. One of the works on display is Breck’s Garden at Giverny, painted around 1887. It is said that Monet grew tired of the American artist colony that sprang up in the village, so it was a privilege for Breck to be allowed to work in the master’s garden. Painted on a summer day, the picture re.ects the essence of Impressionist art — an outdoor scene captured in dazzling sunlight and painted with brush-strokes of bright, vibrant colors.

Pastoral landscapes and blooming gardens feature prominently in the exhibit, as do women and children in bucolic settings and restful poses. Sargent’s In the Orchard and A Lady and a Child Asleep in a Punt Under a Willow, Robinson’s On the Cliff: a Girl Sewing and Irving Ramsey Wiles’ Woman Reading on a Bench portray a serene, carefree world bathed in sunshine. Two of Cassatt’s pictures, Young Woman and Her Child and Sara and Her Mother Admiring the Baby, are pastels on paper. Cassatt’s failing eyesight made it progressively dif.cult for her to paint in oil; working with chalk-like sticks allowed her to bring feathery lightness and luminosity to her pictures.

Hassam is said to be one of the artists who most successfully adapted the spirit of French Impressionism to the American theme, as depicted in his 1918 work, Avenue of the Allies, Fifth Avenue, New York. Part of a series of pictures painted after the Allied victory in World War I, the stirring patriotic imagery of .ags billowing over city streets was regarded as the ultimate development of the artist’s Impressionist style.

The exhibit, on until Oct. 20, is taking place against the odds. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. museums and private collectors were reluctant to let their prized paintings go to Europe by air, and many refused to take the risk. But the exhibit’s curator, William Hauptman, had a convincing argument: he told museums and art owners that if the paintings were not lent, American Impressionism would remain unknown to European audiences.