Impressionism in the Colonies

You may have seen dozens of California Impressionist painting shows over the years. But it’s likely that none of them painted a word-picture of a typical Laguna Beach plein-air artist from the early 1900s, trudging for miles through Laguna Beach’s wild canyons under the broiling summer sun while balancing a mammoth load: huge stretched canvas, big easel, umbrella and heavy paint box.

On-the-spot details such as this (taken, in this case, from an article in the Oct. 5, 1913, edition of The Times) set the Laguna Art Museum’s cumbersomely titled exhibition, “Colonies of American Impressionism: Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Shinnecock and Laguna Beach,” apart from its predecessors.

Rather than just rehanging the oh-so-familiar paintings of the Laguna-based Impressionists, the exhibition, guest-curated by art historian Deborah Epstein Solon, gives them a social context.

The phenomenon of like-minded painters settling in (or regularly visiting) a bucolic location dates back to the 19th century, when Theodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet left Paris to paint in nearby Barbizon, a village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau.

The birth of Impressionism spawned many more colonies, most famously in Giverny. Painters flocked to the village northwest of Paris, where the aloof Claude Monet settled in the early 1890s, even though few ever got to meet the great man.

American colonies of painters dedicated to some version of the Impressionist style were founded in the early 20th century in Laguna Beach, Old Lyme and Cos Cob, Conn. and Shinnecock, N.Y.

In his excellent catalog essay, Will South describes the allure of these countryside locations, despite their inherent lack of the stimuli (and markets) of major cities.

Rural villages had plenty of suitably picturesque subject matter, of course, but in the days before urban sprawl nobody really had to travel far outside a city to find a patch of green.

A more pressing reason to colonize was the romance of it all. Even painters who came only for the summer season got confirmation, South writes, that “he or she was an aesthete, a searcher after the beautiful, a bohemian . . . “

Artists painting in the coastal environments of Eastern art colonies, where nature had long since been tamed, typically evoked scenes of cultivated gardens, rambling homes on winding roads overgrown with wildflowers, and fishing boats in snug harbors.

Dominating Presence

Situated north of New Haven, where the Connecticut River pours into Long Island Sound, Old Lyme was dominated in the early 1900s by the presence of Frederick Childe Hassam, who had studied in Paris in the 1880s.

Hassam, who earlier had worked in Cos Cob (see his luminous “The Smelt Fishers” from 1896), was one of American Impressionism’s leading lights. His best work has a relaxed buoyancy that’s almost Gallic.

By rendering “Stone Bridge, Old Lyme” with a lively rhythm of short brush strokes and flashes of blue, yellow and white, Hassam punches up a view of a boy fishing that might have been merely anecdotal in other hands.

The social glue of Old Lyme was an artist-friendly boarding house known as the Florence Griswold House, where the barns and outbuildings were outfitted as studios. In Willard Metcalf’s painting “May Night,” Miss Florence appears as a genteel wraith before the improbably imposing columns of the front portico.

Cos Cob, just north of Greenwich, had long been linked by train to Manhattan--a mere 30 miles away--by the time John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir settled nearby.

They (along with Hassam) were members of a group of New York and Boston artists with Impressionist leanings who called themselves Ten American Painters. At Cos Cob, they boarded at Holley House, said to be a “live-in version of a European cafe.”

Twachtman’s interest in light and atmosphere led him to paint images of mist and snow, small glimpses of nature at its most poetic. “Snowbound,” from about 1893, evokes a silent world of bare trees and snowdrifts that almost erase the outlines of a rambling house. The odd, wrinkly texture of the paint gives the work a tactile immediacy.

One pervasive, if obvious, aspect of the Eastern colonies’ paintings that necessarily differs from their California counterparts goes unremarked in this show: close attention to seasonal cues, from the look of the sky in winter to the first tiny flowers of spring.

Theodore Robinson, who had studied under Monet, brought the Giverny experience to bear on atmospheric paintings like “Low Tide,” a delicate image of the bare masts of boats against a pale gray sky.

Shinnecock, a village on the northern extremity of Long Island was a summer playground for the well-to-do. The art scene centered around the dashing figure of William Merrit Chase, who took Twachtman’s place in The Ten after he died in 1902.

Chase, who established a school in Shinnecock, was a facile, highly productive painter who worked in several different styles over the years. He was no less energetic--and offhand--as a teacher. One member of his landscape class recalled Chase’s advice: “Take plenty of time for your picture--take two hours if you need it.”

In Chase’s summery painting of his own home, from about 1893, the artist’s small daughter appears as a fairy-tale creature in a huge white bonnet, stagily reaching for a flower.

Laguna’s colony--which gets much more attention in this show than the others, even though it is the most familiar to us--was by far the most isolated. Before the Pacific Coast Highway opened in 1926, visitors were obliged to take a stagecoach over bumpy dirt roads from the El Toro stop of the Santa Fe Railroad; only in summer did the coach make the trip more than once a week.

The artists who made the trip were united by the feeling that, as South writes, “the rest of the world dropped away.”

In Laguna, the lure was America’s last Eden, a still-unspoiled land viewed by artists as a reflection of God’s glory. So devoted were they to the land itself that, as South writes, they “adopted only surface effects [of French Impressionism] and none of the French tendency toward sensuous imagery for its own sake.”

Appearance Emphasized

Instead of using the wizardry of paint and perception to dematerialize form, the Californians emphasized the actual appearance of landscape. What that meant for the conservative development of art in this region we already know from a plethora of previous shows.

The labels in the show unfortunately are hard to read from the distance viewers are obliged (by a guardrail) to stand from the unprotected canvases. For viewers who love the stolid, American version of Impressionism, such details will hardly matter as they look at familiar canvases by William Wendt, Guy Rose, Granville Redmond and others.

But for non-enthusiasts, every bit of information is needed to help explain just why these artists so doggedly ignored the siren song of modernism.

* “Colonies of American Impressionism: Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Shinnecock and Laguna Beach,” at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. $5 general, $4 students with I.D. and seniors; free for children under 12, and free for everyone the first Thursday of every month from 5-9 p.m. Through April 11. (949) 494-6531.