Terra Collection Initiative: American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1900


About the Exhibition

Co-organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Musée des impressionnismes Giverny, the exhibition American Impressionism: A New Vision examined the dissemination of Impressionism in the United States. With nearly eighty paintings from museums in Europe and the United States, including thirty from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition explored the discovery of Impressionism by American artists in the 1880s and 1890s and the movement’s subsequent development around 1900.

Expatriates Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent worked alongside their French colleagues and helped shape the avant-garde trends of their time, while younger American artists learned of Impressionism through the paintings they saw in Paris as well as at home in Boston and New York. They appropriated certain aspects of impressionist art and invented others, adapting their individual styles for an American audience. The exhibition included important works by Cassatt, Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler, but also by other American artists whose names were less familiar to European audiences, such as William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Edmund Tarbell, and John Henry Twachtman. These American artists were highly trained, widely travelled, cosmopolitan painters who sought inspiration and praise both at home and abroad. The exhibition served as an introduction to American Impressionism, raising questions about style and nationality at the turn of the last century.

Organized collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibition reached large audiences in France, Scotland, and Spain.

Dates and Venues

March 28–June 29, 2014
Musée des impressionnismes Giverny, Giverny, France
as L’Impressionnisme et les Américains

July 19–October 19, 2014
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland

November 4, 2014– February 1, 2015
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
as Impresionismo Americano

Select Works in the Exhibition from the Terra Foundation Collection

Publications

Bourguignon, Katherine M., ed. American impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1910. Paris: Éditions Hazan with Musée des impressionnismes Giverny; Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland; Madrid: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2014.

Bourguignon, Katherine M., ed., Impresionismo Americano. Paris: Éditions Hazan with Musée des impressionnismes Giverny; Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland; Madrid: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2014.

Bourguignon, Katherine M., ed., L’impressionnisme et les Américains. Paris: Éditions Hazan with Musée des impressionnismes Giverny; Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland; Madrid: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2014.