Impact of Paris on 19th-Century American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wednesday, 25 October 2006 16:25

New York City - In the late 19th century, American artists by the hundreds – including such luminaries as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer – were drawn irresistibly to Paris, the world’s new art capital, to learn to paint and to establish their reputations.  By studying with leading masters and showing their work in Paris, these artists aimed to attract patronage from American collectors who had begun to buy contemporary French art in earnest soon after the end of the Civil War.  Paris inspired decisive changes in American painters’ styles and subjects, and stimulated the creation of more sophisticated art schools and higher professional standards back in the United States.

Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 24, the landmark exhibition Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 features some 100 oil paintings by 37 Americans whose accomplishments proclaim the truth of Henry James’s 1887 observation: "It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when to-day we look for ‘American art’ we find it mainly in Paris.  When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it."  Representing the breadth of artistic activity in Paris, the exhibition includes painters who were aligned with vanguard tendencies – particularly Impressionism – as well as those who espoused the academic principles that many American patrons preferred.  Exhibition dates October 24, 2006-January 28, 2007.

The showing at the Metropolitan Museum, which is the exhibition’s final stop in an international three-city tour, will feature several important canvases – on view only in this location – that are drawn from the Museum’s own extensive holdings.  Of particular interest are Whistler’s masterly Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Black: Portrait of Théodore Duret, an image of a leading collector, art critic, and consummate “man about Paris,” which was painted in 1883 and exhibited at the 1885 Paris Salon, and Eakins’s Writing Master, a sensitive portrayal of his father, painted in 1882 and shown in the 1890 Paris Salon.  The installation will be further enhanced with fine examples of American sculpture by artists – including Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick William MacMonnies – who also studied and showed their work in Paris.

“Paris became the world’s most beautiful metropolis in the late 19th century, and one of its most dynamic,” noted Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum.  “Filled with the best of the old and the new – from the Louvre’s magnificent collections to Haussmann’s grand boulevards – the city attracted throngs of American art students and artists.   Along with their international counterparts, they found themselves plunged into a vibrant cultural milieu, a place that a Boston painter described as ‘one vast studio.’  Although the lure of Paris for late-19th-century American artists is now widely recognized, Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 breaks new ground as the first-ever treatment of this subject in a major exhibition in leading museums.”

The Metropolitan is the only American venue to include two impressive portraits of leading French artists.  John Singer Sargent’s likeness of Carolus-Duran, painted shortly after the young American had left his renowned teacher’s atelier, captures both the master’s self-assurance and his famously elegant apparel (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute).  It was highly praised when it appeared in the 1879 Paris Salon.  The dignified 1898 portrait by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1856-1942) of the esteemed animal painter Rosa Bonheur depicts the elderly artist in the year before her death, seated at the easel, paintbrush in hand, her white hair transformed into a halo by the play of light (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The exhibition is organized at the Metropolitan Museum by H. Barbara Weinberg, with assistance from Elizabeth Athens, Research Assistant. Exhibition design is byDaniel Kershaw, Senior Exhibition Designer; graphics are by Emil Micha, Senior Graphic Design Manager; and lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Senior Lighting Designers, all of the Museum’s Design Department.

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