[Essay] American Impressionism: Treasures from the Daywood Collection

This Fall, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College presents audiences with an incomparable peek not merely into the incredible story of Impressionism’s rise in the United States but also into the influential world of private collecting. American Impressionism: Treasures from the Daywood Collection features 41 rarely-seen Impressionist paintings originally from the private collection of Arthur Dayton and Ruth Woods Dayton (whose surnames combine to create the collection’s portmanteau name: “Day-Wood”). Celebrated as patrons of the arts in West Virginia and as consequential collectors of American art, the Daytons developed a fine art collection that exceeded 200 works. This beautiful exhibition exemplifies how the support of patrons like the Daytons helped American Impressionists’ claim their niche in the art world, allowing them to hone their crafts, survive as artists, and find national acclaim at the turn of the 20th century.

Comprised of true treasures, this exhibition showcases American artworks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period during which the support of patrons for what were then new and novel art forms could make or break an artist’s career — not to mention an art movement’s ability to stand the test of time. If a movement like American Impressionism did not have its backers, it — and the artists associated with it — would not have thrived as they did nor have found their cherished place today in the canon of art history (even in the 21st century.

That collectors like the Daytons built vast collections of American Impressionist art is especially important to the growth of the movement. As a new art form in the United States, yet one with deep roots on the opposite side of the Atlantic, American Impressionism might have risked seeming overly derivative or outmoded. However, since most American audiences (and many collectors) were being introduced to the style for the first time (rarely exposed to the French original format of three decades prior), American Impressionists’ forays into loose brushwork and scenes of everyday, quotidian life felt vitally fresh and progressive

A New “School” of Art for American Audiences

Although American Impressionism finds its origins on the European continent, it takes on a considerable life of its own once it arrives in the United States and flourishes as a genre — and “school” — of art unto itself. Frequently referred to synonymously as American Realism, a decidedly American attempt to rebrand a style that was, at its core, essentially French, American Impressionism was seen as the first genuinely modern art form in the United States. Indeed, American Impressionism of the turn of the 20th century is a translation of the French Impressionism of the 1870s and 1880s studied firsthand by American artists like John Twachtman and Robert Henri and then carried across the Atlantic and taught to a new generation of student artists.

From Cos Cob, Connecticut, to New York City, the new American Impressionists returned to the United States celebrating the European-inspired ideals of painting “impressions” of the real modern world. In an attempt to make American Impressionism “American,” though, American Impressionists often focused upon undeniably American subject matter to distinguish their art from that of their European counterparts. Nevertheless, given that the style had already passed its prime in Europe by the 1890s, surpassed by more experimental Post-Impressionist styles, American Impressionism of the first decade and a half of the 20th century became dated quickly, as the next generation of American artists discovered increasingly abstract styles of painting. The great revelation for many American artists was the game-changing New York Armory Show of 1913, which showcased nearly 400 works of avant-garde European art, including examples by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat, and Duchamp. Several of the more effusively expressive works in the exhibition hint at the Armory Show’s influence on American Impressionists in the years surrounding and beyond World War I.

American Impressionism’s Popularity

It was also the sheer breadth of subject matters and styles that American Impressionism encompassed as a catch-all, umbrella term that appealed to consumers and patrons throughout the country, especially the well-moneyed art-collecting sets. American Impressionism, so inclusive a term, charmed those who liked portraits, as well as those enamored with landscapes, genre scenes, still lifes, and anything in between. “Impressionism” as a term really deals less specifically with the style or manner used than with the idea of representing scenes out of the everyday, contemporary world of the time.

The true novelty of American Impressionism was that it was focused on the present, with paintings frequently painted out of doors — as we call it, “en plein air” — and left in their initial sketchy state, almost as if studies that to earlier generations would appear completely unfinished. It was not a uniqueness of painting outdoors that made Impressionism outstanding (artists had been doing so for millennia); it was that, for the most part, most Impressionist artists would not return to the studio to remake their sketches and transfer them into more precisely academic works. The outdoor “sketch” was the finished piece.

Art historically we may categorize American impressionism as descending from French Impressionism, but, as is evident in this exhibition, American Impressionism adopts a tenor and spirit all its own. The remarkable aspect of American Impressionism — and perhaps of much of American art in general — is that there always seems to be something indescribably American about it, even if it is often difficult to put one’s finger upon what exactly makes American art look “American.” As in works like John Sloan’s Gully at Low Tide, with its rocky East Coast seascape, or John Fulton Folinsbee’s Outskirts of Trenton, both in the exhibition, the American-ness may lie in the appearance of a seascape itself or even in the named location that marks the scene as decidedly American.

For lovers of American art, truly there is very little not to love about Impressionism. Now, a century beyond the movement’s hey-day, this extraordinary exhibition epitomizes why American Impressionism soared to popular and critical acclaim in the first decades of the 20th century and why it still garners such a strong following to this day

By by H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., Executive Director and Chief Curator

American Impressionism: Treasures from the Daywood Collection will be on view in Gallery II from July 31 to October 24.