The American Impressionists

French impressionist painting has become one of the most sought after and, therefore, overpriced arts in history. The exquisite American impressionist school, which followed in the light footsteps of the French, remains undervalued. Yet museum directors--sensitive to a growing popular interest in American painting--have been snapping up such characteristic examples as Childe Hassam's Church at Old Lyme, Conn, and Maurice Prendergast's Sunset and Sea Fog (opposite).

The main strength of the impressionists, both foreign and domestic, was color--and color has always been a sometime thing. Man never has needed a highly developed color sense in order to get around, though he must see shapes fairly accurately, hence his color impressions tend to be comparatively dim, vague and intermittent, and to reproduce badly in the mind's eye. This helps explain why the French inventors of impressionism struck their contemporaries for a time as crazy. In subordinating form to color, they seemed to do violence to nature. And in picturing the sunny dazzle of daytime outdoors, they seemed to show a strident, eye-hurting, never-never land.

French Trail Blazers. Monet and Renoir nevertheless persisted in following the evidence of their own eyes rather than the accepted (dun-colored) mode of seeing. Though they lost their first battles to a color-blind public, they could not possibly lose the war, since optical truth was on their side. The truth spread slowly. Toward the close of the igth century it was brought across the Atlantic by the best, of the American impressionists:

Childe Hassam (1859-1935) began work as a magazine illustrator and made a good living at it. Three years in Paris opened his eyes to impressionism, and by 1889, when he came home to apply its viewpoint to the American scene, Americans were almost ready to accept the results. Plump, pink and tweedy, Hassam painted pictures that were pretty yet robust, like a small brass band playing in the park.

He studied the light on the church at Old Lyme as assiduously as Monet had studied the rosier light on Rouen cathedral, yet no one would compare the invariably pleasant Hassam with trail-blazing Monet. Where Monet had created new problems to solve, Hassam skillfully ducked old ones. For example, the clock faces in his Church could not have been painted in sharp focus without violating his soft focus view of the building, nor could they have been done in soft focus without frustrating man's natural urge to read clocks--so he simply hid them in leaves.

John Twachtman (1853-1902) began his career in a Cincinnati window shade factory, painting decorations. Making his way to Europe for study, he gradually worked deeper into the spirit of impressionism than any other American. Twachtman saw that air itself has color. Nature was to him a prim Salome who kept on all her seven veils. Deftly, delicately, with more tact than passion, he painted her veiled in atmosphere. His Fishing Boats at Gloucester demonstrates Twachtman's genius for evanescent things.

Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924) was perhaps the timidest revolutionary in the history of American painting. A poor Bostonian, early apprenticed to a painter of showcards for stores, he worked at card-painting until he was 27. By then he had saved $1,000. He showed some of his sketches to a minister's wife and put the case to her: Should he go to Paris to study? "I certainly should!" she said, with proper Bostonian briskness and optimism. So he did.

The $1,000 lasted Prendergast for more than three years, during which he learned and unlearned a great deal about art. What he took from impressionism was the use of pure colors, laid side by side in tiny strokes like mosaic. This happened to accord well with a way of seeing that was peculiarly his own: gentle, dreamy, naive and perhaps a trifle astigmatic. Prendergast painted the world as a tapestry wherein were only nice people having fun amidst soft airs. His rich command of color and design gave dignity to a vision that would otherwise have seemed schoolgirlish.

His pictures looked queer indeed to his fellow countrymen. Home again and penniless, Prendergast found he could sell almost none. He went back to lettering showcards, and lived frugally with his brother, a frame maker, in a Boston suburb. Sunday mornings he would spend painting the girls in bright dresses at Revere Beach. But he kept his distance from them, quoting Kipling's lines: If a man would be successful in his art, art, art. He must keep the girls away from his heart, heart, heart.

His brother's frames began to be profitable, and in 1914 the two left Massachusetts for Manhattan's Washington Square, where Prendergast gained the appreciation of a small circle. Very quietly, he had made a unique contribution to American painting. On the back of one of his sketches a collector found this sadhappy message from Prendergast the devoted artist to Prendergast the neglected man: "The love you liberate in your work is the only love you keep."

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