Exhibitions
EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN PRINTS
Through to September 2008
The Impressionist Era features a selection of ten works, ranging from James McNeill Whistler Portrait of Drouet of 1859 to Frank W. Benson’s Rocky River from 1921 and demonstrates two trends that can be credited to the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe: Impressionism and the revival of etching as a creative medium.
As painting outdoors (en plein-air) was gaining momentum in the United States and Europe, artists readily embraced the emerging style with its signature bravura brushwork and expanding subject matter including one’s mundane surroundings. Nearly simultaneous to that development, Whistler and Seymour Haden in the 1850s were among the most influential British artists credited with revising etching, a form of printing, to an eager group of European and American artists. While mechanically produced etchings may not be done en plein-air, their imagery is dependent on the rapidly emerging style of the French and American Impressionists.