‘American Impressionism’ Remains On View At Bruce Museum In Greenwich

GREENWICH — Until January 8, The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science is presenting an exhibition that explores an overlooked aspect of Impressionism, analyzing how a group of turn-of-the-20th Century artists treated the theme of work, in “American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work.”

The exhibition was curated by Susan G. Larkin, a scholar of American Impressionist painting.

The exhibition of 46 paintings includes work by 20 artists, among them the best known American Impressionists of the time — William Merritt Chase, Joseph DeCamp, Daniel Garber, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, John Singer Sargent, Robert Spencer, John H. Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir — as well as some accomplished artists rarely seen.

The works are on loan from private collections, galleries and museums throughout the country, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cincinnati Art Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and the Florence Griswold Museum.

Impressionism has long been twinned with leisure. American Impressionists, like their French predecessors, devoted themselves to celebrating the recreations of their contemporaries. Labor, by contrast, is associated with the genre painters who preceded the American Impressionists and the Realists and Regionalists who followed them. Surprisingly, however, many American Impressionists treated the theme of labor as a central theme in both figurative paintings and landscapes.

In both Europe and the United States, American Impressionists differed from their European counterparts by depicting people at work and landscapes associated with work.

In so doing, they avoided any suggestion of hardship, celebrated the dignity of labor, and participated in shaping an American identity.

The exhibition and its catalog are the first sustained investigations of this important theme, addressing by turns images of work sites in the city, the countryside, on the waterfront, in factories and mills, and in the home.

The exhibition is divided into five sections based on work sites. “The City” includes a surprisingly diverse group of images.

The images in “The Countryside” section go beyond the expected views of farmers planting, plowing, or harvesting to encompass a wide range of rural tasks such as laborers hauling wood and cutting ice, and a quiet view of a Dutch youth sharpening his scythe.

“The Waterfront” demonstrates that these artists turned for inspiration to the deeply rooted commercial underpinnings of the New England coast: shipbuilding, freight-hauling, and fishing.

The works in the section on “Factories, Mills, and Quarries” range in date from the 1890s to 1921. Women are represented in another section of this exhibition as mill workers.

“The Home,” by contrast, acknowledges the work done by women of all classes within the domestic sphere. Paintings in this section depict women cooking, cleaning, sewing, working as a milliner within a comfortable home, and doing laundry.

The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science is at 1 Museum Drive. Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 am to 5 pm; and Sunday, 1 to 5 pm. The museum is accessible to individuals with disabilities.

For information, call 203-869-0376 or visit www.BruceMuseum.org.