Sunday 26 October 2008New Book Celebrates Painting from America’s Gilded Age

Publication of new volume accompanies the major new exhibition An Impressionist Sensibility, at the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum, which celebrates the Museum’s recent reopening in the newly restored and refurbished Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. A selection of the paintings presented in this volume will be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2007

An Impressionist Sensibility will hit bookstores on January 11, 2007. Published by the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum in association with London publisher D Giles Ltd, the book is a visually stunning journey into the period in American art known as ‘The Gilded Age’, as seen through a selection of over 40 paintings by the leading names in late nineteenth-century American art. From the 1870s through to the outbreak of the First World War American artists fell under the influence of major French impressionist artists, like Monet and Pisarro, as well as leading Francophile artist like James McNeill Whistler and Theodore Robinson, and increasingly abandoned John Ruskin’s credo of ‘truth to nature’ in favour of the rallying cry of ‘art for art’s sake’. Earlier reverence for narrative and accuracy to the original subject, which had formed the backbone of the American landscape and narrative painting tradition most strongly evoked in the works of Asher B. Durand and the Hudson River School artists, gave way to a highly intellectualized sensory appreciation for the abstract beauty of a work of art.

At the heart of this volume and the accompanying exhibition is a remarkable collection of over forty great American paintings amassed in the late 1980s by Texans Hugh and Marie Halff. These include works by Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Theodore Robinson and John Singer Sargent, and 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). Each work is presented as a full-page colour plate with accompanying stunning details and fascinating archival images, many showing artists at work.

“The Halff collection is an exceptional portrait of America during a cosmopolitan age, when the impressionists opened our borders to new ideas about life and art,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

An Impressionist Sensibility charts the development of a generation of artists, how they helped shape the aesthetic taste of the nation and how they responded to the beginnings of modernist impulses in art and society. The exhibition showcases the artists’ distinctly American interpretations of impressionism, which began in France in the early 1870s. Every one of the artists in the Halffs’ collection studied in France between the 1870s and the 1920s. Chase, Sargent and others crossed paths in Paris, London and Venice, drawn by a shared desire to learn from both old and new masters.

"The Halffs’ collection focuses on a generation of artists who looked to France for crucial training, not so much for the subjects or themes, but for the modern impulses found in impressionism,” said Eleanor Jones Harvey, chief curator at the museum and curator of the exhibition. “Each artist in the exhibition represents a variation on the theme of making American art something truly extraordinary at the turn of the 20th century.”

The Author:
Eleanor Jones Harvey is chief curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum, prior to which she was curator of American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, and assistant curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is a leading specialist in nineteenth-century art.

AN IMPRESSIONIST SENSIBILITY
The Halff Collection
Eleanor Jones Harvey
136 pages, 9” x 12” (305 x 229mm)
80 colour and 28 black-and-white illustrations
ISBN: 1 904832 32 6 (10 digit)
ISBN: 978 1 904832 32 4 (13 digit)

Price: US$45.00/UK£25.00, hardback with colour dust jacket
Publication date: January 11th, 2007
Publisher: D. Giles Limited, London

Distributed in the UK and Rest of World (excluding US and Canada) by
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For Further Information and Review Copies:
In the UK contact: Liz Japes
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In the USA contact: Karen Lunstead, Marketing Manager
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For Illustrations and Interviews:
At Smithsonian American Art Museum:
Laura Baptiste
Tel: 1 202 275 1595
Note to editors: Selected high-resolution images for publicity only may be downloaded from ftp://saam-press@ftp.si.edu. Call (202) 275-1594 for the password. Additional information about the exhibition is available from the museum’s online press room at americanart.si.edu/press.

About the Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum celebrates the vision and creativity of Americans with approximately 41,000 artworks in all media spanning more than three centuries. Its National Historic Landmark building, a dazzling showcase for American art and portraiture, is located at Eighth and F streets N.W. in the heart of a revitalized downtown arts district. Museum hours are 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. Admission is free. Metrorail station: Gallery Place/Chinatown (Red, Yellow and Green lines). Smithsonian Information: (202) 633-1000; (202) 357-1729 (TTY). Recorded information: (202) 275-1500. Web sites: americanart.si.edu and reynoldscenter.org.