Rachel Greenstein Savage
posted 9 May 2006

It is a truism in museum circles that given the choice, the public would prefer to see exhibitions featuring 'all impressionism, all the time'. The 'Americans in Paris 1860-1900' exhibition at the National Gallery, London at least partially fits this bill; most of the best paintings in the exhibition are impressionist or impressionist-influenced works.

Pre-twentieth century American art is seriously under-represented at art galleries outside the United States. In the exhibition, just two of the 87 paintings are from British public collections with a further four from other European galleries. The vast majority are from American collections large and small. This means that it represents an excellent chance for European gallery goers to see works by artists nearly unknown outside the United States. While Whistler's portrait of his mother seated in a chair wearing a lace cap and looking sombre, 'Arrangement in Grey and Black, No1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother' will be familiar, other outstanding artists such as Childe Hassam and Henry Ossawa Tanner are not exactly household names - even if Hassam's New York cityscape depicting the buildings decked out in flags in honour of the parade celebrating America's entry into the war, 'Allies Day, May 1917', will be familiar to many as the illustration in a number of history books about World War I.

The period covered by the exhibition, 1860-1900, represents an exciting era in the development of French art. The entrenched academic style of painting and its associated institutions such as the Salon, with its strict delimiting of the appropriate subjects for painting and emphasis on depicting a subject realistically was coming under attack. Artistic upstarts, such as the group that later became known as the Impressionists and their Salon des independents were breaking new ground by elevating a freer technique of painting with its emphasis on the emotion of the subject being depicted and experimentation with light. The impressionists painted their works quickly and often in the open-air working in contrast to the vast serious studios in which artists could work on a single painting for years on end. The range of American artists represented in this show trained with, worked alongside, and exhibited with both groups. By using a cut-off date of 1900, the exhibition also draws in the post-impressionists, who moved on to develop even more experimental techniques, often with an emphasis on colour and line, represented in this case by Maurice Prendergast.

Frustratingly, the exhibition's wall text and its manner of arranging the paintings thematically do not help to elucidate the differences amongst or within the groups. The wall text dwells almost exclusively on the manifest content of the paintings to the total exclusion of a discussion of the techniques involved in their production. In one room, Hassam's 'April Showers, Champs Elysées' hangs alongside Nelson Bickford's 'In the Tuileries Garden, Paris'. Both depict typical Parisian scenes and the text describes the content of the paintings. However, in terms of their technique and outlook, the paintings are in no way alike. Bickford's painting verges on commercial illustration rather than art while Hassam's is a sensitive study of the effect of rain on a cityscape. The exhibition catalogue does a better job of touching on the various artists' differences but continues to pursue an agenda emphasising the similarities amongst the artists exhibited, masking their important and interesting differences.

The exhibition suffers as well from its exclusive concentration on American artists without providing visual representations of the context in which they were painting. In essence, the exhibition represents the work of two different groups of American painters, each of whom was interacting with a different group of French contemporaries. Robert Vonnoh's 'Poppies', depicting a scene near Giverny, brings to mind similar works by Monet, near whom the artist was living when it was painted. While the catalogue provides a small illustration of a Monet painting of a similar poppy-covered field, gallery goers are not given the opportunity to understand the Vonnoh in the context of the French paintings that shaped it.

Similarly, the sentimentality of the painting by Elizabeth Bouguereau of 'The Shepherd David' which depicts the Biblical hero at the moment after he has saved a lamb from being eaten by a lion may seem out of context surrounded by more impressionistic works. But its inclusion in the official French salon should come as no surprise given the popularity of realist treatments of Biblical and other historical subjects amongst the officially sanctioned French painters of the day.

After London, the exhibition will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In both these locations, as at the National Gallery, the permanent collection provides enough examples of the French art that influenced the works in the exhibition. It is only a pity that they will not be shown together.

Till 21 May 2006.