An Exhibition That Celebrates The Beauty Of Life

By Shannon Hicks

GREENWICH — The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science recently opened its latest major exhibition, called “American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work.” The exhibition has already proven so popular that a black tie gala benefit event on October 1 and four lectures being presented on Monday mornings in October have all sold out.

Fortunately there is plenty of time for Joe Q. and Jane Public to visit the exhibition, and a trip to Greenwich is worth it for this collection. The show will remain on view until January 8.

Guest curator Susan G. Larkin, a scholar of American Impressionist painting, has put together an exhibition that offers 46 paintings, representing 20 artists, including William Merritt Chase, Joseph DeCamp, Daniel Garber, Childe Hassam, William Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, John Singer Sargent, Robert Spencer, John H. Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir — some of the best-known American Impressionists.

Artists, as pointed out in notes supplied by the museum, have long expressed an interest in human labor, capturing images of farmers, ship builders, stonecutters, laundresses, and other workers. Beginning in the 1870s, French Impressionists broke with that theme and began depicting people at leisure.

Americans soon followed suit, but differed from their French counterparts by continuing to show workers almost equally.

The Bruce Museum’s exhibit is the first to survey the treatment of the theme of labor by a group of artists commonly associated with images of leisure. It is the third one to treat work as the theme of a full exhibition, but while the previous two exhibitions — one at the Smithsonian and one at The Art Institute of Chicago — each looked at physical labor, neither included American Impressionism pieces.

“American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work” is divided into five sections, according to work sites that inspired the American painters: City, Countryside, Waterfront, The Home, and Factories, Mills & Quarries.

In curating the exhibition, Ms Larkin made a point of including work by what she calls “the superstars” of American Impressionism, the Twachts, the Weirs, the Sargents, et al.

“I didn’t want this to be a greatest hits show, however,” Ms Larkin said during a lunch event at the museum earlier this month. “I didn’t want things that everyone already knew. I wanted things that were not normally seen, such as Chase’s ‘Washing Day [A Backyard Reminiscence of Brooklyn Wash-Day],’ which is such an anomaly from [the artist’s] work.”

Ms Larkin also selected Hassam’s “Le Val-de-Grâce, Spring Morning.” The oil on canvas from 1888, which shows a hackney driver in Paris, is “evocative of a major city coming to life.” A few years later the artist created “Cab Stand at Night, Madison Square” (1891, oil on paper), a counterpart to the European scene, which Ms Larkin also included in the Bruce Museum show.

A series of four mill paintings by Weir are “a personal highlight,” said Ms Larkin. The paintings — “Willimantic Thread Factory” (circa 1893), “U.S. Thread Company Mills, Willimantic, Connecticut” (circa 1893–97), “The Factory Village” (1897) and “Willimantic, Connecticut” — are four of six views of an immense factory complex in northeastern Connecticut that Weir painted between 1893 and 1903. The Greenwich show is the first time these four works have been shown together.

“During his lifetime the artist would only loan one [of the factory paintings] to an institution at a time,” Ms Larkin said.

(It is one of Weir’s factory paintings, in fact – “The Factory Village” – that was selected to be used for Ms Larkin’s fabulous exhibition catalog.)

Ellen Day Hale is one of very few women represented in the exhibition. Her painting “June” is strong and sure-handed, and Ms Larkin compared that piece, a careful oil on canvas portrait done in 1893, to the equally luminous “The Blue Cup,” done by Joseph DeCamp in 1909. Both of these works can be viewed in person at The Bruce Museum thanks to the work by Ms Larkin in pulling together such impressive examples to illustrate her exhibition theme.

In curating the show, Ms Larkin also wanted to include “fresh names to people visiting the museum.”

With this in mind she placed works by Robert Spencer (such as his “One O’Clock Break,” a circa 1913 oil on canvas depicting Heath & Morris Mills, in the Springdale section of New Hope, Penn.), Edward Rook (who was a member of the National Academy of Design, and exhibited at The Carnegie Institute and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, among others, but priced his work so high that he sold few paintings during his lifetime and whose work only began being appreciated again during the past quarter of a century), and even Ernest Lawson (whose undated oil on canvas “Potato Diggers” crosses genres and styles) within the vicinity of works by the aforementioned “superstars” of American Impressionism.

It took nearly three years for the show to be created and designed. Bruce Museum Executive Director Peter C. Sutton is appropriately pleased with it.

“It’s always wonderful to see a show come to fruition,” Mr Sutton said earlier this month. “Sometimes you forget, after studying works separately, how beautiful some of these works truly are.

“One typically associates Impressionism with depictions of recreation and leisure,” he continued. “Work, however, is intrinsic to our identity. ‘The Beauty of Work’ is a particularly thoughtful exhibition.”

The Bruce Museum can be contacted at 203-869-0376 or BruceMuseum.org