An Impressionist SensibilityThe Halff Collection
Published by GILES in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Publish Date — January 2007 (UK and USA)
Dimensions — 144 pages, 305 x 229mm (9 x 12 in.), portrait
Illustrations — 80 colour and 28 b&w illustrations
Hardback price — UK£25.00/US$45.00
ISBN — 1-904832-32-6
ISBN — 978-1-904832-32-4
Book Details (pdf) — An_Impressionist_Sensibility_ai.pdf
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Presents colour plates and details of over 40 paintings by the leading names in late 19th-century American art
Over 40 great American paintings are featured, including works by Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper,Theodore Robinson and John Singer Sargent.
About the Book
This beautiful volume was published to accompany the exhibition, An Impressionist Sensibility, at the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum, which celebrated the Museum’s recent reopening in the newly restored and refurbished Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C.
At the heart of the exhibition is a remarkable collection of paintings amassed in the late 1980s by Texans Hugh and Marie Halff. The works range from Ernest Lawson’s celebration of modern urbanism in his Flatiron Building (1906-07), to the exoticism of Harry Siddons Mowbray’s Two Women (1893-96), and the harmonious plein-air geometry of Theodore Robinson’s The Anchorage,Cos Cob (1894). The Halff’s collection spans the period in American art known as ‘The Gilded Age’, when Ruskin’s credo of ‘truth to nature’ gave way to Whistler’s rallying cry of ‘art for art’s sake’. Reverence for narrative gave way toa highly intellectualized sensory appreciation for the abstract beauty of a work of art, reflecting late 19th-century American cultural aspirations.
