Introduction: “What Is Impressionism?”

Clark, Alexis; Fowle​, Frances

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Introduction: “What Is Impressionism?”

Alexis Clark and Frances Fowle

Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism

Before World War I, several articles in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere were titled with the question: What is impressionism? W. H. W., “What Is Impressionism?,”...

Author

Alexis Clark and Frances Fowle

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.001

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19999

Chapter subject tags:Impressionism (Art)Art criticism--HistoryPainting, French--19th centuryArt--HistoriographyVisual culture--History--19th centuryArt--History--19th centuryDurand-Ruel, Paul, 1831-1922Art dealers--19th centuryImpressionism (Art)--FranceImpressionism (Art)--United StatesImpressionism (Art)--Great Britain

Introduction: “What Is Impressionism?”

Alexis Clark and Frances Fowle

Before World War I, several articles published in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere were titled with the question: What is impressionism?1 W. H. W., “What Is Impressionism?,” Art Amateur 28, no. 1 (December 1892): 5. See also Duncan C. Phillips, “What Is Impressionism?,” Art and Progress 3, no. 11 (September 1912). Kenneth McConkey has written that Dewhurst published an article with the same title in 1911. By World War I, impressionism’s definition, so it would seem, had become a point of international contestation. See Kenneth McConkey, British Impressionism (New York: Abrams, 1989). See also Emily Ballew Neff and George T. M. Shackelford, American Painters in the Age of Impressionism (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), 13. The proliferation of such articles would seem to suggest a worldwide intellectual curiosity around what impressionism was, but also what it was not. In his Modern Painting (1893), Irish art writer George Moore complained that “impressionism” was an ill-defined term, only to then fail to provide an adequate definition. While lamenting that “impressionism is a word that has lent itself to every kind of misinterpretation,” Moore proceeded to unhelpfully offer that “in its exact sense all true painting is penetrated with impressionism.”2 George Moore, Modern Painting (London: Walter Scott, 1893), 84. Like so many commentators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Moore defended impressionism by tying it to the art-historical past: Titian, Rembrandt, or any artist who had supposedly practiced “true painting.” If all “true painting” possessed an ineffable element of impressionism, then a subsequent question arose: What made the French impressionists the Impressionists?

In a way, the initial question—What is impressionism?—paralleled the complaints and criticisms hurled at the artists who participated in the 1874 Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs and whom Louis Leroy snidely christened “the impressionists.”3 Louis Leroy, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists,” Charivari (April 25, 1874), in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 573–76. For a discussion of the criticism of this exhibition, see Stephen F. Eisenman, “The Intransigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got Their Name,” in Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, ed. Mary Thompkins Lewis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 149–61. In the decades that followed, what impressionism was—a school, a style, a movement—remained open to debate. As such, the articles titled “What Is Impressionism?” must be read as teaching the prewar public to separate “true” impressionist paintings from supposedly second-rate works by artists who followed in the brushstrokes of Claude Monet and his French artist-compatriots. Once educated, readers and, perhaps even more importantly, art writers in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere would not mistakenly label a work of art “impressionist” that failed to satisfy the definitions or meet the standards laid out by these articles. Articles such as those that appeared in Art Amateur and Art and Progress thus set out to school readers and writers in the explicit technical and stylistic parameters and the implicit national and geographic boundaries to be placed on impressionism: it was to be an art associated with France and French artists who, starting in the 1870s, had staged a series of independent exhibitions in open rebellion against stultifying academic traditions and staid institutions, only to be subsequently enshrined in and applauded by those same institutions.

Before World War I, however, impressionism was not associated solely with France. The lack of association between style and nation necessitated the aforementioned articles. Well into the mid-twentieth century, “impressionism” remained a polysemous term and dynamic concept without always clearly codified stylistic criteria. What constituted “impressionism” expanded (and contracted) as its production, display, and reception, French and otherwise, shifted from place to place, moment to moment, and language to language. These multiple, competing, and, at times, contradictory conceptions coincided with marked attempts to codify the history of this art. In short articles and dense books, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers laid the foundation for future studies in impressionism worldwide. In France the story of this art would be defined by such art writers and allies as Edmond Duranty, Théodore Duret, Camille Mauclair, Émile Zola, and many more; in Germany, by such historians as Richard Muther and Julius Meier-Graefe; and in Britain, by such artists, novelists, and intimate friends of the French impressionists as George Moore and Wynford Dewhurst. Illustrating their books and articles were reproductions of works by the French impressionists. Paintings such as versions of Monet’s Argenteuil (1874) and pastels such as Edgar Degas’s many scenes of ballet lessons and performances were reproduced multiple times across different publications. The repeated illustration of these works by French artists quickly produced an internationally accepted canon to accompany the story of impressionism (figs. 1, 2).4 James Cutting has explored the reproduction of the French impressionists’ paintings as important to the cultivation of taste. See James Cutting, “Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 79–94.

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Description: Reproduction of Claude Monet's "Argenteuil," 1874 by Unknown

Fig. 1. Claude Monet, Argenteuil, 1874. Oil on canvas, 60 × 79.7 cm (23 5/8 × 31 3/8 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Reproduced in Wynford Dewhurst Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (London: G. Newnes, 1904), n.p.

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Description: Reproduction of Claude Monet's "Bridge at Argenteuil," 1874 by Unknown

Fig. 2. Claude Monet, Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874. Oil on canvas, 60 × 79.7 cm (23 5/8 × 31 3/8 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Reproduced in Léonce Bénédite, Great Painters of the Nineteenth-Century and Their Paintings (London: Pitman, 1910), 180.

Whatever their own national affiliation, these authorities did not limit impressionism to France but mapped its dissemination as it crossed French borders to become an international phenomenon. While defining the field of French impressionism and reproducing works by these artists, the aforementioned writers also championed an increasingly standardized set of international impressionists, some of whom painted in what would today be classified as an impressionist, naturalist, or plein-air idiom: Émile Claus, Alexander Harrison (figs. 3, 4), John Lavery, Max Liebermann, John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, James McNeill Whistler, and Anders Zorn numbered among the non-French artists lauded as impressionists. Writers throughout Europe and the United States tended to hail the same groups of artists as disseminating this artistic idiom abroad. In tandem with mapping the export of impressionism, French impressionism was described as importing and synthesizing different national schools of painting: British, Dutch, Japanese, and Spanish.

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Description: Reproduction of Alexander Harrison's "In Arcady," 1886 by Unknown

Fig. 3. Alexander Harrison, In Arcady, 1886. Oil on canvas, 197 × 290 cm (77 9/16 × 114 3/16 in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Reproduced in Wynford Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (London: G. Newnes, 1904), n.p.

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Fig. 4. Alexander Harrison, In Arcady, 1886. Oil on canvas, 197 × 290 cm (77 9/16 × 114 3/16 in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Reproduced in Léonce Bénédite, Great Painters of the Nineteenth-Century and Their Paintings (London: Pitman, 1910), 244.

In turn, these ties allowed artists and authors around the world to claim impressionism as part of their national, and so local, painterly traditions, while making their own mark on the history of impressionism. In Brazil, Japan, South Africa, and Turkey, local artists were concurrently stamped, and alternately ridiculed or praised, as impressionist. Effectively expanding the definition and application of “impressionism,” local artists and writers often used the term as a metonym for what they understood as modernity and modern art. Art locally labeled “impressionist” dialogued with the formation of modern national and cultural identities. Around the world, this label acted as an indexical sign of modernity, often in its anti-academicism and, even as some critics looked to tether it to national traditions, in its simultaneous refusal to adhere to those same traditions. Impressionism in these places pushed back against local traditions with new ways of making art as well as seeing the world. In the history of art, French impressionism has often been associated with an appreciation for originality and newness. These valences were true both inside and outside France and, indeed, Europe. Modernity, of course, comes with its own fraught history, especially in its connection to the imperial and colonial exploitation of peoples and resources and the imposition of Western culture on those places. In this connection to modernity, impressionism could signal the encroachment of a foreign art and culture—one that threatened to oppress local traditions, tastes, and identities. As a global but concomitantly national and local artistic language, impressionism thereby spoke to contentious debates around modernism, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism. Newly postcolonial nations, entirely new nations, or nations newly in contact with Western conceptions of modernity reverberated with questions about how to be or become part of the modern and cosmopolitan world, while also maintaining their own national (and, often, within those nations, regional) traditions. Artists, writers, and other arts professionals celebrated, shunned, and otherwise responded to impressionism depending upon what they perceived to be the rewards and risks of cosmopolitanism.

Not all critics believed that the world needed or desired such a cosmopolitan art. For instance, the U.S. critic Hamlin Garland, observing the ubiquity of impressionism at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, proceeded to argue that art holding the widest appeal did not flatten the world but respected and represented local differences. Grudgingly, Garland reported that “impressionism as a principle has affected the younger men of Russia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and America as well as the plein air school of Giverny.”5 Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894), 121. To Garland, impressionism had erased differences between these places.

To Moore, also writing in 1893, Whistler was the only artist whose “impressionism” could not be defined in terms of a specific nation. In Modern Painting he described his initial confusion at Whistler’s denial, in his “Ten O’Clock” lecture, of nationality in art: “Mr. Whistler has shared his life equally between America, France, and England. He is the one solitary example of cosmopolitanism in art, for there is nothing in his pictures to show that they come from the north, the south, the east, or the west. They are compounds of all that is great in Eastern and Western culture. Conscious of this, and fearing that it might be used as an argument against his art, Mr. Whistler threw over the entire history, not only of art but of the world; and declared boldly that art was, like science, not national but essentially cosmopolitan.”6 Moore, Modern Painting, 3. Whistler, while appreciated by Moore, presented problems when it came to neatly classifying him and his work by nationality or style.

Garland’s and Moore’s complaints about impressionism as a cosmopolitan art read as mild, however, when compared with embittered diatribes such as those issued by the German cultural commentator Max Nordau. In statements brimming with nationalist zeal, Nordau condemned impressionism as a nationless art, albeit one produced by French artists, whom he denounced as foreign interlopers unleashing an illness (“nerve-vibrations”) onto the world and so leading German art into decadence and decline.7 Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1895). Nordau’s text was originally published in German in 1892. (Moore, too, described the impressionism of Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro as “decadent,” but largely due to its pseudoscientific analysis of natural phenomena.) Impressionism, and the artists associated with it, united the world, ushered in the dissolution of distinct national art schools, or confirmed the supremacy (or fears of the supposed supremacy) of the École française—and these were not necessarily opposed positions.

Emphasizing the processes by which impressionism came to be a globalized aesthetic, this anthology attends to the layered reception, exhibition, and publication of French impressionism. It underscores this globalization as an imperfect and incomplete process, often racked by local debates around a country’s place in and relation to the world. The essays herein further explore historical positions toward French impressionism from perspectives outside of France. This anthology does not ignore France and French impressionism. Yet the contributors study France and French impressionism from positions and perspectives that may seem oblique. In their attention to the globalization but also localization of impressionism, the compiled essays interrogate impressionism as an artistic language simultaneously operating locally, nationally, and internationally. They scrutinize how artists and arts professionals from around the world translated and so transformed impressionism. Concomitantly, French impressionism and its circulation via original works of art or reproductions altered the production of new art and the codification of new art-critical discourses around the world. To understand how the history of impressionism has come to be almost exclusively the history of French art and artists, we must excavate the complexities of what “impressionism” meant around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These essays thus take up the calls of those like Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kwame Appiah, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel to study historical centers from supposed peripheries. Europe, and especially Paris, have existed as privileged centers of modernity and modern art, a centeredness consummate with their often imperialist or colonialist connection with the supposed periphery.8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris: The Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches,” Artl@s 4, no. 1 (2015), https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas. Significant work toward this decentering has been accomplished in Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Norton, 2007); Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); and Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Cosmopolitanism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). That centeredness may be deconstructed as a mythos when seen and read outside the center. The inclusion here of places typically construed as part of the periphery has been determined by past history and historiography—the existence of archives or records that demonstrate the existence of networks of knowledge workers, and the exhibitions, markets, and museums that circulated original works of art and reproductions of it. Including and elevating these perspectives on art history may permit those in the twenty-first century to see, read, and study impressionism as always already operating in relation to places beyond France. This collection of essays further traces transnational networks of artists, critics, scholars, curators, and dealers working across linguistic, institutional, geographical, and political boundaries. The modes of translation facilitated by these historical networks and explored by the present anthology span translation from sensory perception of the impression to the materiality of impressionist painting; ekphratic translation, from image to word; linguistic translation, from language to language; intermedial translation, from painting to other media (photography, print, sculpture, and otherwise); and physical translation, from place to place. Coupled with this interest in multiple modes of translation, these essays deploy new methodological tools, theories, and paradigms to map connections between French impressionism and art produced around the world: postcolonialism; media studies; global narratives; transnationalism; and the circulation of knowledge. In underlining impressionism as a globalizing artistic idiom, this anthology ultimately responds to recent calls to: 1) rethink canons and extend the discipline of art history; 2) attend to transnational networks of circulation (many of them tied to capitalism, imperialism, and their institutions); 3) build online image databases and digitized archives and resources; and 4) launch e-publications that broaden access to art history. To engage with impressionism on a global scale, the subfield must interrogate its past historiography and museography.

Perhaps the most pressing issue related to compiling this anthology has arisen from the clash between philosophical promises and the practical realities of global history. Within the subfield of nineteenth-century art history, there exists a tension between tendencies to define the parameters of study through national boundaries and incipient efforts to trace circuits, networks, and markets transcending those same borders. Historically and still today, the study of impressionism has been caught between these poles. Starting in the 1970s and coinciding with the centenary of the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, there was a flurry of publications focused on French impressionism. Contemporary with these publications, there was a renewed interest in iterations of impressionism outside France.9 The number of nation-based studies exceeds what may be reasonably cited in an endnote. Some critical instances of this type of scholarship on impressionism in anglophone nations include Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Terence Lane, Australian Impressionism (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007); and Christopher Riopelle, ed., Australia’s Impressionists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). William H. Gerdts and H. Barbara Weinberg made substantial contributions to developing the subfield of American impressionism. As examples of their scholarship, see William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (New York: Abbeville, 1984); and H. Barbara Weinberg, American Impressionism (New York: Rizzoli, 1994). In 1973 Marion Isaacs released a bibliography on South African impressionism: The South African Impressionist Painters: A Select Bibliography (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersand, 1973). Building on these nation-based studies of impressionism, this anthology highlights the transnational circuits that accelerated the global spread of impressionism. By simultaneously expanding the dialogue around French impressionism and extending that dialogue to include artists and writers outside of France—and, indeed, beyond Europe and the United States—the present anthology dissects what it meant for impressionism to be coded as French (and, in that Frenchness, sometimes decidedly “foreign”). These essays, while not abandoning France and French impressionism, contribute to the ongoing work to dismantle the Francocentrism of impressionism studies and, to an extent, the anglocentrism of art history as a discipline.

A crucial precedent to this anthology and its approaches—one to which many of the essays here respond—has been World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920, edited by Norma Broude.10 Norma Broude, ed., World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920 (New York: Abrams, 1994). Her 1990 anthology chronicled the international spread of impressionism with a thoughtful concentration on how artists around the world viewed their national landscapes through the lens of modernity, sharing technical concerns as well as a mutual interest in the transient effects of nature. Broude incorporated such artists as Peder Severin Krøyer, Frits Thaulow, and Helen McNicoll into a postmodernist world of “impressionisms.” Despite expanding the canon of impressionism to incorporate non-French artists, her anthology effectively produced its own, relatively limited canon, as this new set of artists identified as Canadian impressionists or Australian impressionists came to be repeated across subsequent exhibitions and publications. Even as these “world impressionists” started to be championed, those more committed to studying impressionism as a purely French phenomenon insisted on the peripherality of non-French artists, citing Monet and his contemporaries as the main protagonists of this moment of artistic experimentation and innovation. As Broude showed, and as the present collection of essays affirms, the label “impressionism” could not, and cannot be, mapped onto one style. What once would have been labeled “impressionist” is now defined more precisely as “symbolist” or “expressionist,” requiring the field to examine how this shift in perception and classification happened. Realizing and respecting the differences in the local technical and stylistic conception of impressionism is crucial to this anthology’s aim to write a global history of this art. In order to make the point that writing a global history of impressionism remains a process still underway, this book has been entitled Globalizing Impressionism.

IMPRESSIONISM IN ART HISTORY

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the explosion of print and visual media. More affordable methods of reproduction—woodburytypes, collotypes, photogravures, and photolithographs—together with miles of railroad track and telegraph lines transmitted French impressionism abroad, permitting the public around the world to see and read about it.11 The multiple ways in which artworks circulated have started to be thoroughly mined. For a discussion of specialist and nonspecialist international art histories written in the nineteenth century, see Amy Von Lintel, “Surveying the Field: The Popular Origins of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2010). Von Lintel has analyzed the rise of popular art histories in nineteenth-century France and Britain, with an attention to how these histories, upon their translation, reached readers far afield. To highlight one book that has started to shift the field’s attention to the circulation of artworks outside the nexus of Paris–London–New York, see Marta Filipová, Cultures of International Exhibitions, 1840–1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins (London: Routledge, 2015). Despite the limitations of black-and-white reproductions in capturing the techniques and palette of the French impressionists, the circulation of illustrated texts shaped and expedited the local production, exhibition, and writing about impressionism, French and otherwise.12 For a discussion of the effects of reproductions on the making of global taste, see James Elkins, “Canon and Globalization,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Bryzski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 55–78. For the psychological effect of reproductions on taste, see James Cutting, “Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon,” in Bryzski, Partisan Canons, 79–94. Lastly, for a discussion of the consistency of reproductions across survey textbooks and other standard art-historical literature, see Robert Jensen, “Measuring Canons: Reflections on Innovation and the Nineteenth-Century Canon of European Art,” in Bryzski, Partisan Canons, 27–54. For an example of a complaint about black-and-white reproductions, see Wynford Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (London: G. Newnes, 1904), 43. Via the printed page, the experience of impressionism was not limited to original works of art or the materiality of those works. “Impressionism” and “impression” carried multiple interpretations in the nineteenth century. Richard Shiff here analyzes how mid-nineteenth-century criticism in France discussed the experience of the “impression” in terms of poetry, memory, and uninhibited sensory and emotional response. Liberated from theoretical constructs and prescribed practices, the chimerical impression nonetheless had to be materially fixed by the artist. As Shiff deftly contends, therein lay a critical paradox when it came to painting impressions.

Impressionism also had to be defined and fixed by writers and publishers. Throughout this anthology are discussions of written accounts—by critics and correspondents—whose words shifted the local terms of debate in places such as Brazil and the Netherlands. Picking up from the discussion of “impression” as a critical term for art history, Joost van der Hoeven reviews how the late nineteenth-century Dutch press used the Hague School to introduce French impressionism to readers in the Netherlands. Writing from Paris, the Dutch press quickly circulated news of Édouard Manet and the French impressionists. Interestingly, Van der Hoeven finds that the press’s opinion of these artists failed to evolve from its initial disapproval and revulsion toward impressionism. What most disappointed Dutch correspondents, and the French contributors who penned articles for the Dutch press, was the French impressionists’ supposed failure to paint an idée; instead, French artists were accused of reducing painting to sketchily rendering what the eye perceived. Despite their dissatisfaction with impressionism, these writers nonetheless started to connect this art to the artists of the Hague School who, dedicated to working out-of-doors, took their inspiration largely from the realist painting of the École de 1830.

These complaints and their resilience in the Netherlands paralleled criticism issued in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century press in Brazil. Ana Marie Tavares Cavalcanti traces the shifting reasons for Brazilian writers’ pessimistic responses to impressionism. In the 1870s, Paris-based Brazilian reporters exaggerated the French public’s outraged response to impressionism, even as they paraphrased columns of art criticism by prominent French writers. Following from these reports, the vitriol directed at impressionism started to affect the discourse around Brazilian art and artists. Black Brazilian artist Firmino Monteiro endured harsh criticism for applying supposedly unsophisticated impressionist techniques in his painting, for instance. By the 1910s the reasons for such pessimistic responses had shifted. Whereas critics had once balked at the supposed absence of technical dexterity and execution, Brazilian artists who continued to work in an impressionist idiom were now indicted as unoriginal and inauthentic. While Dutch and Brazilian readers encountered pessimistic appraisals in their local presses, they had limited access to French impressionist works at local exhibitions, which, in turn, prohibited them from making their own assessments. Only in 1886 would the French impressionists be shown in the Netherlands; and only in the 1920s would Brazilian museums exhibit paintings by Manet and his French impressionist confrères.

Circulated in their original language of publication and sometimes translations, French writers’ books and articles proceeded to influence local discourse. For example, Diego Martelli, who had traveled to France and there befriended critic Edmond Duranty, wrote news articles on French impressionism for Italian readers. Less enlightened art critics such as Charles De Kay in the United States and P. G. Hamerton in Britain used what they had read about impressionism to indict French artists as well as those from their own respective countries. Realizing the significance of the written word, for their third exhibition the Société anonyme—Gustave Caillebotte, Armand Guillaumin, Paul Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Sisley—embraced the “impressionist” label. They launched the periodical L’impressionniste to broadcast their art to the public; and, to learn what had been written about their work abroad, they subscribed to international press-clipping services. In a 1903 letter, the well-read Pissarro complained that British artist and writer Wynford Dewhurst knew “nothing of the impressionist movement.” Dewhurst, who authored one of the aforementioned articles entitled “What is Impressionism?,” likely believed himself to be quite knowledgeable, as an acolyte of Monet and self-proclaimed “apostle of impressionism.”13 Pissarro continued his diatribe against Dewhurst: “The fact is we have studies which prove the contrary. He omits the influence which Claude Lorrain, Corot, the whole eighteenth century and Chardin especially exerted on us. But what he has no suspicion of is that Turner and Constable, while they taught us something, showed us in their works that they had no understanding of the analysis of shadow, which in Turner’s painting is simply used as an effect, a mere absence of light. As far as tone division is concerned, Turner proved the value of this as a method, among methods, although he did not apply it correctly and naturally; besides we derived from the eighteenth century. It seems to me that Turner, too, looked at the works of Claude Lorrain.” For Pissarro’s translated letters, see John Rewald, ed., Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien (New York: Pantheon, 1943), 355–56.

Many of the early books dedicated to French impressionism were written, promoted, or exported by those who dealt in this art. Supporting publications tailored to broad but also elite audiences, dealers had a stake in selling impressionist paintings, works on paper, and sculptures but also the story of impressionism. To that end, Goupil et cie sponsored specialist arts periodicals, organized catalogues, licensed reproduction rights, and solicited contributions from prominent critics. Ambroise Vollard wrote biographies of Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose works he stockpiled and sold well into the twentieth century. While not penning his own biographies of these artists, Paul Durand-Ruel held the reproduction rights for the French impressionists’ photographed portraits as well as much of their artistic work. He could therefore dictate which works were reproduced, to then become the internationally accepted canon of French impressionism. Hadrien Viraben explores how photographic portraits of the French impressionists, for which Durand-Ruel held the rights, were reprinted in early twentieth-century French-, English-, and Italian-language books. Photographic portraits functioned as mnemonic aids, teaching the public around the world to recognize the faces of Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir. Viraben traces how these portraits acted as portable and accessible monuments that, in turn, informed the production of actual, albeit small-scale, sculpted monuments to the French impressionists.

Turning to the ways published art histories connected parts of the world without access to collections or exhibitions of French impressionism, Alexis Clark surveys how French-authored and English-translated histories of art expedited the formation of accepted stories and canons of impressionism. By 1900 international copyright legislation, imperialism, and publishing interests made English a global language; and English-language translations subsequently introduced audiences throughout the anglophone world to impressionism. Perhaps realizing that what they wrote reached readers far from France, Léonce Bénédite, Duret, and Mauclair, whose publications form the focus of Clark’s essay, acknowledged that artists around the world had adapted the impressionist idiom. Still, these writers did not necessarily esteem impressionists from outside France as equal to the French impressionists. Far from it. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, French nationalist circles started to claim this art as quintessentially French and as reinvigorating the French national school of art.

Coupled with the circulation of French-authored and English-translated books, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers around the world published their own book-length histories on impressionism. In Germany, Richard Muther’s weighty Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert and Julius Meier-Graefe’s Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst and Der moderne Impressionismus introduced scholars and students to this art. Their popular publications had still more of an impact upon translation into English, French, and, eventually, Japanese.14 Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: J. Hoffman, 1904); and Julius Meier-Graefe, Der moderne Impressionismus (Berlin: Bard, 1904). See also Richard Muther, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Munich: G. Hirth, 1893–94). Muther’s Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert was translated into English in 1907 to become History of Modern Painting and then published by the London firm J. M. Dent. Meier-Graefe’s Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst appeared in English as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics in 1908, while his monographs on Cézanne, Degas, and Renoir appeared in English in the 1920s and 1930s. Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst would be translated by Florence Simmonds, whose work extended to French- and German-language texts on art history, religious studies, and Montessori education. Richard Muther, Ein Jahrhundert französischer Malerei (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1901). As discussed by Mitchell B. Frank, the histories of art published by the German scholars Hermann Bahr and Werner Weisbach identified impressionism as the latest effort to resolve what they deemed a transhistorical and transnational problem: how to represent perception. Bahr and especially Weisbach eschewed more polemical discourse around modern art, and instead linked French impressionism to precedents such as Titian and Velázquez, but also to art-historical periods now rarely connected to this art, including ancient Roman mural painting and Chinese ink painting. By explaining impressionism in transnational and transhistorical terms, Bahr and Weisbach disconnected style from nation, which then enabled them to insert contemporary German painting into their long histories of impressionism. Frank consequently demonstrates that nationalism and internationalism were not always opposed paradigms when it came to writing art history.

Even as the international ranks of impressionists were celebrated for making the École française into an École mondiale—a blatantly nationalist celebration—these ranks were at times diminished and snubbed by French commentators. In his 1913 biography, Mary Cassatt: Un peintre des enfants et des mères, Achille Ségard, for instance, dismissed the U.S.-born Cassatt as failing to make any contribution to French modern art.15 Kevin Sharp, “How Mary Cassatt Became an American Artist,” in Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, ed. Judith A. Butler (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 166. Likely due to his insistence on French superiority and American provinciality, Ségard’s biography would not be published as an English-language translation. Nonetheless, before Segard's snub, in the 1890s writers based in the United States started to explore how their country made its own imprint on impressionism. Emily C. Burns shows how U.S. critics understood the adaptation of impressionism as signaling a dependence on foreign examples. Nonetheless, this did not negate originality: an American artist could be simultaneously dependent and original. Concentrating on the 1894 Seventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago, Burns discusses how the multiplicity of styles and techniques on display were united under the label “impressionism,” in an echo of William James’s philosophies on experience, unity, and multiplicity.

Before World War I, impressionism tended to be the final (or almost final) chapter in the story of nineteenth-century art. The art labeled “impressionist” was synonymous with modernity, if not independence. Compared with this collapse between impressionism and modernity, by the interwar period, those connections too had broken down. Tracing responses to Turkish impressionism, Ahu Antmen discusses how, before the end of the Ottoman Empire (1918), Turkish artists who embraced impressionist techniques to paint landscapes and, provocatively, the female nude were perceived to be modern. With the rise of secular Turkey, appreciation for these artists rapidly eroded. Younger Turkish artists denounced their impressionist colleagues as outmoded. Not all interwar art writers or exhibition organizers condemned impressionism to the past or non-French impressionists to the periphery, however. Laura Moure Cecchini reveals that until 1948, Italian organizers of the Venice Biennale labeled a swathe of international artists as “impressionists.” Underscoring the persistence of “impressionism” as a polysemous term well into the twentieth century, Moure Cecchini demonstrates that only with the 1948 Biennale would impressionism be limited to art from France. Before that post–World War II Biennale, impressionists from across Europe but outside France were championed as original; by 1948, those previously described as impressionists were shunted to the sidelines and denounced as imitators of the French. However much academic analysis of impressionism had been catalyzed by the early published art histories, by the 1920s and 1930s a new perspective was being adopted. Professionally trained art-historical circles in Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States—many of them tied to museums and universities—had started to narrow the stylistic and geographic parameters placed on impressionism. The lines surrounding the study of impressionism were thus redrawn. Women artists such as Berthe Morisot and Cassatt were temporarily removed from the canon of impressionism, while male French artists such as Manet, who had never exhibited in the eight exhibitions staged in Paris, were retained. Other European, British, and American artists, who had contributed to globalizing this idiom, were absorbed back into their national schools or simply struck from histories of impressionism.

MARKETS AND MUSEUMS

Social structures and networks are a key focus of this anthology, and the story of global impressionism overlaps with the developing international market for this art and its consequent introduction into public museums. In advocating for French impressionism’s place in the annals of art history, writers speculated on the intertwined art-historical and financial futures of this art. Determined to move impressionism away from critical debate and into the canon, a writer such as Théodore Duret defined the “impressionists” as a distinct circle of artists, separate from those he considered more peripheral participants in the Société anonyme. Duret further traced this art to French artists already securely inscribed into art history: Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles-François Daubigny, for instance, all of whom had had their work recently deposited at the Musée du Louvre.16 Théodore Duret, “Claude Monet,” in Critique d’avant-garde (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1885), 94.

The notion of impressionism as the culminating point in a long tradition of French painting was exploited by dealers such as Durand-Ruel, who displayed the work of Monet and his contemporaries alongside precursors such as Eugène Delacroix and the École de 1830 in survey exhibitions of nineteenth-century French art, deliberately disassociating the younger artists from the label “impressionism.” A handful of soon-to-be impressionists were represented in the dealer’s earliest London exhibitions in the 1870s, but only Degas and Pissarro found a British buyer at that time.17 Samuel Barlow of Stakehill acquired Pissarro’s Rue des Voisins, Louveciennes, of 1871 in about 1872, later adding three more works by the artist to his collection. See Cecil Gould, “An Early Buyer of French Impressionists in England,” Burlington Magazine 108, no. 756 (1 March 1966): 141–42. On the early market for impressionism in Britain, see Caroline Corbeau Parsons, Impressionists in London: Artists in Exile (London: Tate, 2017). Despite this initial, limited interest from English collectors, it was not until 1883, when Durand-Ruel organized an exhibition of almost fifty works at Dowdeswell’s Gallery (London), that the British public had the opportunity to survey French impressionism. Some critics were appalled, objecting to the artists’ supposed laziness of execution, describing them as “the Cheap-Jacks of art.”18 Anonymous, “Art in May,” Magazine of Art (1883): xxix. Five years later the British critic William Ernest Henley described impressionism as “another name for ignorance and a standing apology for ineptitude.”19 W. E. Henley, Memorial Catalogue of the French and Dutch Loan Exhibition, Edinburgh International Exhibition 1886 (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1888), xxix.

Returning to Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, Durand-Ruel tirelessly promoted the French impressionists, even risking personal bankruptcy. Not until the 1880s did other Paris-based dealers, such as Theo van Gogh and Georges Petit, attempt to compete in this market. From 1882 Petit devised a series of high-profile exhibitions featuring the French impressionists as well as naturalist and juste milieu artists. His series of Expositions internationales de peinture drew large crowds and included non-French artists such as Sargent, as well as Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Monet. Petit also staged solo exhibitions for several of the impressionists, culminating in the celebratory Monet-Rodin retrospective of 1889.20 On Georges Petit and the diversification of the art market in Paris, see Léa de Saint-Raymond, “Le pari des enchères: Le lancement de nouveaux marchés artistiques à Paris entre les années 1830 et 1939” (PhD diss., University of Nanterre [Paris X], 2018). As other dealers, including Vollard and Bernheim-Jeune frères, started to showcase these artists, Durand-Ruel shifted his attention to the United States, where Gilded Age industrialists had developed a taste for French art.21 Goupil opened its New York branch in 1846 (some report the year as 1848) and asked Michael Knoedler to assume control of the branch in 1852, which he did. By 1857 Knoedler had bought Goupil’s New York location and continued to operate under the Goupil name. Knoedler died of tuberculosis in 1878 (Goupil retired in 1884), but the gallery that carried Knoedler’s name made art history. On Goupil, see Agnes Pénot, La maison Goupil: Galerie d’art international au XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions Mars et Martin, 2017). See also Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (Autumn 2012), https://bit.ly/3joRrN6; and Anne Helmreich, “The Goupil Gallery at the Intersection between London, Continent, and Empire,” in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939, ed. Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 65–84. Durand-Ruel mounted exhibitions including French impressionism in Boston in 1883 (the same year as the Dowdeswell’s Gallery exhibition in London) and New York in 1886. By 1887 he had established a temporary gallery in Manhattan.22 In 1883 the art trade in the United States was drastically affected by the tariffs imposed on imported foreign art. In March of that year, the U.S. Congress raised the customs duty from 10 to 30 percent, and it was only through a loophole in the law, allowing dealers to bring works in temporarily, that Durand-Ruel could afford to hold his first exhibitions of impressionist art in Boston (1883) and New York (1886). As Laura D. Corey contends, Cassatt played a leading role in Durand-Ruel’s success, acting as an intermediary and negotiating critical U.S. sales of French impressionist works on behalf of the dealer. Corey maintains that Cassatt cannot be reduced to a supporting role in shaping the U.S. market, and persuasively demonstrates that the artist took a leading role in the organization of Durand-Ruel’s 1886 New York exhibition, Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris. The purchase of many of these works by the Havemeyers and their subsequent donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929 demonstrates that the market for this art would be entangled early on with its inclusion in official sites and exhibitions.

Durand-Ruel’s New York operation competed with New York gallerists and European dealers seeking entry into the lucrative U.S. market. Knoedler, which had formerly been the New York branch of Goupil et cie, was among the first to capitalize on Durand-Ruel’s success. As Frances Fowle notes, another early supporter of impressionism outside France was the Scottish dealer Alexander Reid, who had once worked with Theo van Gogh at Boussod, Valadon et cie (the firm that succeeded Goupil) in Paris.23 On Reid, see Frances Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin: The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid (1854–1928) (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2010). Setting up shop in Glasgow in 1889, Reid held his first exhibit of French impressionist art in London and Glasgow in 1891–92. Throughout the next decade, he sold a handful of French impressionist paintings to Scottish mercantile collectors. Those who collaborated with Paris-based operations—not just Reid, but David Croal Thomson in London, Knoedler in New York, and Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin—often partnered with local critics and historians to produce exhibitions and catalogues of modern French art, thus spreading information about it to wider audiences (and potential buyers). In tandem with selling French impressionism, these dealers used their showrooms to promote local impressionists. Reid, for example, coordinated solo shows of the Scottish impressionists (the “Glasgow Boys”), while Thomson, in addition to writing copy and editing arts periodicals, supported the so-called “London Impressionists,” who exhibited at London’s Goupil Gallery in 1889.

Even as French impressionism started to be exported and exhibited worldwide and as local iterations of impressionism formed around the world, Paris and its environs remained an important draw for student-artists interested in seeing and studying this art and training in studios such as the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi. Because many students did not speak French fluently, they could not always engage easily with local artists. In the summer months, French and foreign artists escaped the studio to work outdoors at artists’ colonies such as Grez-sur-Loing. In the 1880s, British, North American, Swedish, Danish, and even Japanese artists painted side-by-side at Grez, influencing and inspiring one another’s production.24 On the Scottish artists at Grez, see Kenneth McConkey, “From Grez to Glasgow; French Naturalist Influence in Scottish Painting,” Scottish Art Review 15, no. 4 (1982): 16–23. On the Swedish colony at Grez, see Alexandra Herlitz, Grez sur Loing Revisited: The International Artists’ Colony in a Different Light (Göteborg: Markadam, 2013). As Fowle discusses, the Scottish impressionists, or “Glasgow Boys,” drew inspiration not only from the artists they encountered in Paris and at Grez, but from Japanese prints and works by Whistler, Degas, and others that they were able to see in exhibitions and at galleries in Scotland. As a result, they developed a decorative style of impressionism quite distinct from other British impressionists. Many of the British and American artists who trained in Paris and worked in artists’ colonies developed a hybrid style influenced as much by naturalism as by impressionism. Nevertheless, Monet remained an important draw, and in the 1890s a colony of American artists sprang up at Giverny. They included Theodore Robinson, who later formed his own school of impressionism in upstate New York, and Lilla Cabot Perry, who encouraged her fellow Bostonians to purchase paintings by Monet.25 On American impressionism, see Katherine M. Bourguignon, ed., American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1900 (Paris: Hazan, 2014), with essays by Richard Brettell and Frances Fowle. On Boston collectors, see Erica E. Hirshler, Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting (London: Royal Academy, 2005). The nineteenth century also witnessed the staging of important Expositions universelles. Just as the Irish artist John Lavery captured the excitement of the Glasgow International in 1888, both Robinson and fellow francophile Childe Hassam recorded the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, brought to life through their new “impressionist” idiom. Concurrently in Chicago, Bertha Palmer, advised by both Cassatt and, more importantly, art agent and curator Sarah Hallowell, was building up her own major collection of impressionist art, featuring numerous examples of Monet’s art that eventually found their way to the Art Institute.26 Richard R. Brettell, “Monet’s Haystacks Reconsidered,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 15.

Monet’s presence at Giverny was a draw not only for American but also Japanese artists and collectors who made their way to Giverny as early as the 1880s. As Yukiko Kato explains, the Japanese dealer Tadamasa Hayashi became acquainted with Monet as early as 1884, through their mutual interest in ukiyo-e prints. Hayashi soon developed an interest in French impressionism and subsequently accumulated around 160 works, which were to form the foundation for the first modern art museum in Japan. However, his robust promotion of French impressionism pitted him against those in Japan who supported more traditional styles and practices. Unfortunately, Hayashi’s plans for the museum foundered after his death in 1906, leaving most of his collection to be acquired by U.S. museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As Kato discusses, the tide soon would turn in the appreciation for impressionism in Japan. The interwar “Tidal Wave of Western Masterpieces” (Taisei Meiga no Oonami) led Japanese collectors to take a more active interest in this art.

As the example of Hayashi shows, the line between collectors and curators was often blurred. In 1896 the Berlin Nationalgalerie, under the direction of Hugo von Tschudi (who amassed a substantial personal collection of impressionist paintings), acquired Cézanne’s The Mill on the Couleuvre near Pontoise (1881) from Durand-Ruel. Despite vociferous opposition from critics such as Nordau, in Germany modern French art would be promoted by the national museums and also by private collectors, including Count Harry Kessler, Baron Kurt von Mutzenbecher, and Karl Ernst Osthaus, some of whom opened their homes to the public.27 Gloria Groom, “Vollard and German Collectors,” in Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, ed. Rebecca A. Rabinow (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), 232. Largely under the guidance of the Belgian designer Henry van de Velde, these German patrons assembled their collections of impressionist and post-impressionist art through Bernheim-Jeune frères and Vollard.28 Groom, “Vollard and German Collectors,” 234–36. The well-connected Vollard also stoked the German and Russian markets for modern art.29 On Vollard’s Russian clients, see Albert Kostenevich, “Russian Clients of Ambroise Vollard,” in Rabinow, Cézanne to Picasso, 243–56. He forged still more ties to the Cassirers, who, in turn, developed the German and Dutch markets for impressionism and post-impressionism.

This enthusiasm aside, in the decade before World War I, French impressionism’s reception by the international art market and museums remained uneven. While the National Gallery in London debated the acquisition of paintings by Monet and Sisley before World War I, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies in Wales and Irish dealer and connoisseur Hugh Lane readily acquired important examples of impressionist art for Cardiff and Dublin. The National Gallery showed little enthusiasm when, controversially, Lane’s collection passed to London, after his death aboard the ill-fated Lusitania in 1915; and in the 1920s the Tate Gallery was equally equivocal when offered temporary loans from the Davies sisters’ collection.30 On the Davies sisters, see Mark Evans, “The Davies Sisters of Llandinam and Impressionism for Wales 1908–1923,” Journal of the History of Collections 16, no. 2 (2004): 219–53; Robert Meyrick, “Hugh Blaker: Doing His Bit for the Moderns,” Journal of the History of Collections 16, no. 2 (2004): 173–89.

As with publications and reproductions, the dissemination of French impressionist artworks would be coded as crucial to the education of local audiences and artists who, in turn, worked to make the impressionist idiom their own. In Japan, impressionism would be discussed in terms of “civilization and enlightenment.” In South Africa, the discussion hinged on that same ideal: enlightenment. Thanks to Lane, French impressionist paintings were first publicly displayed in South Africa in 1910, with the opening of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. As Morna O’Neill explains, Lane assembled the gallery’s collection of modern French art in support of the Randlords, whose fortunes were built on the extraction of diamonds and gold from the African continent. For Lane, impressionism could be used to cultivate a cosmopolitan identity for South African artists and audiences. To that effect, black South African artist Moses Tladi, who worked in an impressionist idiom into the 1930s, was able to draw inspiration from paintings by Monet without leaving his own country. Other South African artists, traveling between South African and European cities, put their own artistic and cultural imprint on impressionism when they recorded the South African landscape.

Immigrant artists in Australia also saw that continent through a colonial lens. Turning to Tom Roberts’s and Arthur Streeton’s paintings of the Australian landscape, Emma Kindred addresses the glaring absence of First Nations in most of their major paintings, as well as their mythologizing of the bush and pastoral progress. While Streeton struck any sign of Aboriginal populations and indigenous flora and fauna from his large-scale landscapes, making the Australian landscape into a colonized landscape, Roberts did engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through his own ethnographic mode of collecting cultural objects and through travel writings that he published in the popular press. Roberts’s paintings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been relegated to the margins of studies of impressionism in Australia, but, as Kindred insists, these images complicate readings of Australian impressionism, as well as Streeton’s and Roberts’s contribution to the colonial project.

Not until after World War I did the market for impressionism truly flourish and did French impressionist paintings begin to be more regularly acquired and accessioned by the world’s museums. Bolstered by the sale of prominent personal collections such as that of Henri Rouart in 1912 and by the deaths of Degas, Renoir, and Monet, French impressionist works were now sold in Paris by a new generation of art dealers: Paul Guillaume, Étienne Bignou, Paul Rosenberg, Georges Wildenstein, and the Galerie Barbazanges all sourced impressionist art for the British and U.S. markets in the 1920s.31 See Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981). This decade also witnessed a number of crucial bequests of French impressionist paintings to museums in the United States. Though the 1913 Armory Show aroused scandal and sensation, it also prompted the Metropolitan Museum of Art to purchase Cézanne’s View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph (1887). In 1922 the Art Institute of Chicago welcomed the Bertha and Potter Palmer collection. Bertha, who had helped organize the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, launched the Potters’ collection with purchases from Durand-Ruel’s gallery, including six paintings from the Stacks of Wheat series (1891) by Monet.32 Brettell, “Monet’s Haystacks Reconsidered.” In Philadelphia, the chemist, businessman, and educator Albert C. Barnes established his own gallery dedicated to impressionism, especially that by Renoir and Cézanne, many of whose works he had acquired through Guillaume.33 On Barnes, see Colin B. Bailey, “The Origins of the Barnes Collection 1912–15,” in “Collectors and Collecting,” special issue, Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1265 (August 2008): 534–43. In 1929 the Metropolitan’s collection of impressionism would be buttressed by the addition of the H. O. Havemeyer Bequest, which would be hung side-by-side with works bought from the Hayashi estate sale before World War I.

For the discipline of art history, then, the present volume contends that the importance of impressionism extended beyond the late nineteenth century and certainly beyond France. Impressionism should not be viewed only from a French perspective, but from a multiplicity of views with artists, critics, scholars, curators, and dealers around the world participating in a shared discourse from their national and local viewpoint. It is the aim of this anthology to create a more inclusive record of historical events and discussions, one that takes into consideration the subtle differences among conceptions of and claims on impressionism around the world. In so doing, this anthology promises to reshape the ways in which impressionism will be understood, documented, and transmitted to future students and scholars writing on this art. It is to the history of impressionism as a shared language that this anthology now turns.

A NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

As observant readers will have already realized, throughout this anthology, the i in “impressionism” will remain lowercase—even in discussions of French impressionism. In twentieth-century anglophone scholarly literature, capitalization produced and sustained a hierarchy of national, regional, and local permutations of impressionism. The impressionism and the impressionists associated with France have tended to be capitalized: “Impressionism” and “the Impressionists” have been an implicit shorthand for French art and artists. In the same art-historical literature, impressionists outside France have tended to be discussed in the lowercase: “American impressionism” or “Australian impressionists.” A loaded orthographic choice, this capitalization of the i in “impressionism” has celebrated French art and artists while diminishing the contributions of artists around the world to this globalized aesthetic and discourse. More, this capitalization has reified the supposed chronological primacy and stylistic supremacy of French impressionism and has signaled its foundational position in the teleology of modernism, with its sweepingly restricted narratives and limited cast of protagonists: French impressionism as the chronologically first impressionism, French impressionism as the stylistically first and most sophisticated impressionism, French impressionism as the foundation of Greenbergian Modernism. This orthographic convention has unquestioningly privileged France as the origin of mid- to late nineteenth-century artistic innovation and experimentation. In using the lowercase to discuss all impressionists, this anthology instead insists on coevality, contemporaneousness, and parity, out of an interest in and respect for all permutations of impressionism as contributing to a global historical discourse. As demonstrated by the essays assembled here, impressionism, capitalized or not, would be a critical but also contested term for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art histories, markets, and exhibitions and institutions in France and, importantly, in many places far from it.

1 W. H. W., “What Is Impressionism?,” Art Amateur 28, no. 1 (December 1892): 5. See also Duncan C. Phillips, “What Is Impressionism?,” Art and Progress 3, no. 11 (September 1912). Kenneth McConkey has written that Dewhurst published an article with the same title in 1911. By World War I, impressionism’s definition, so it would seem, had become a point of international contestation. See Kenneth McConkey, British Impressionism (New York: Abrams, 1989). See also Emily Ballew Neff and George T. M. Shackelford, American Painters in the Age of Impressionism (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), 13. »

2 George Moore, Modern Painting (London: Walter Scott, 1893), 84. »

3 Louis Leroy, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists,” Charivari (April 25, 1874), in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 573–76. For a discussion of the criticism of this exhibition, see Stephen F. Eisenman, “The Intransigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got Their Name,” in Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, ed. Mary Thompkins Lewis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 149–61. »

4 James Cutting has explored the reproduction of the French impressionists’ paintings as important to the cultivation of taste. See James Cutting, “Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 79–94. »

5 Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894), 121. »

6 Moore, Modern Painting, 3. »

7 Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1895). Nordau’s text was originally published in German in 1892. »

8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris: The Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches,” Artl@s 4, no. 1 (2015), https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas. Significant work toward this decentering has been accomplished in Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Norton, 2007); Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); and Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Cosmopolitanism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). »

9 The number of nation-based studies exceeds what may be reasonably cited in an endnote. Some critical instances of this type of scholarship on impressionism in anglophone nations include Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Terence Lane, Australian Impressionism (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007); and Christopher Riopelle, ed., Australia’s Impressionists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). William H. Gerdts and H. Barbara Weinberg made substantial contributions to developing the subfield of American impressionism. As examples of their scholarship, see William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (New York: Abbeville, 1984); and H. Barbara Weinberg, American Impressionism (New York: Rizzoli, 1994). In 1973 Marion Isaacs released a bibliography on South African impressionism: The South African Impressionist Painters: A Select Bibliography (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersand, 1973). »

10 Norma Broude, ed., World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920 (New York: Abrams, 1994). »

11 The multiple ways in which artworks circulated have started to be thoroughly mined. For a discussion of specialist and nonspecialist international art histories written in the nineteenth century, see Amy Von Lintel, “Surveying the Field: The Popular Origins of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2010). Von Lintel has analyzed the rise of popular art histories in nineteenth-century France and Britain, with an attention to how these histories, upon their translation, reached readers far afield. To highlight one book that has started to shift the field’s attention to the circulation of artworks outside the nexus of Paris–London–New York, see Marta Filipová, Cultures of International Exhibitions, 1840–1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins (London: Routledge, 2015). »

12 For a discussion of the effects of reproductions on the making of global taste, see James Elkins, “Canon and Globalization,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Bryzski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 55–78. For the psychological effect of reproductions on taste, see James Cutting, “Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon,” in Bryzski, Partisan Canons, 79–94. Lastly, for a discussion of the consistency of reproductions across survey textbooks and other standard art-historical literature, see Robert Jensen, “Measuring Canons: Reflections on Innovation and the Nineteenth-Century Canon of European Art,” in Bryzski, Partisan Canons, 27–54. For an example of a complaint about black-and-white reproductions, see Wynford Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (London: G. Newnes, 1904), 43. »

13 Pissarro continued his diatribe against Dewhurst: “The fact is we have studies which prove the contrary. He omits the influence which Claude Lorrain, Corot, the whole eighteenth century and Chardin especially exerted on us. But what he has no suspicion of is that Turner and Constable, while they taught us something, showed us in their works that they had no understanding of the analysis of shadow, which in Turner’s painting is simply used as an effect, a mere absence of light. As far as tone division is concerned, Turner proved the value of this as a method, among methods, although he did not apply it correctly and naturally; besides we derived from the eighteenth century. It seems to me that Turner, too, looked at the works of Claude Lorrain.” For Pissarro’s translated letters, see John Rewald, ed., Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien (New York: Pantheon, 1943), 355–56. »

14 Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: J. Hoffman, 1904); and Julius Meier-Graefe, Der moderne Impressionismus (Berlin: Bard, 1904). See also Richard Muther, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Munich: G. Hirth, 1893–94). Muther’s Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert was translated into English in 1907 to become History of Modern Painting and then published by the London firm J. M. Dent. Meier-Graefe’s Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst appeared in English as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics in 1908, while his monographs on Cézanne, Degas, and Renoir appeared in English in the 1920s and 1930s. Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst would be translated by Florence Simmonds, whose work extended to French- and German-language texts on art history, religious studies, and Montessori education. Richard Muther, Ein Jahrhundert französischer Malerei (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1901). »

15 Kevin Sharp, “How Mary Cassatt Became an American Artist,” in Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, ed. Judith A. Butler (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 166. »

16 Théodore Duret, “Claude Monet,” in Critique d’avant-garde (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1885), 94. »

17 Samuel Barlow of Stakehill acquired Pissarro’s Rue des Voisins, Louveciennes, of 1871 in about 1872, later adding three more works by the artist to his collection. See Cecil Gould, “An Early Buyer of French Impressionists in England,” Burlington Magazine 108, no. 756 (1 March 1966): 141–42. On the early market for impressionism in Britain, see Caroline Corbeau Parsons, Impressionists in London: Artists in Exile (London: Tate, 2017). »

18 Anonymous, “Art in May,” Magazine of Art (1883): xxix. »

19 W. E. Henley, Memorial Catalogue of the French and Dutch Loan Exhibition, Edinburgh International Exhibition 1886 (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1888), xxix. »

20 On Georges Petit and the diversification of the art market in Paris, see Léa de Saint-Raymond, “Le pari des enchères: Le lancement de nouveaux marchés artistiques à Paris entre les années 1830 et 1939” (PhD diss., University of Nanterre [Paris X], 2018). »

21 Goupil opened its New York branch in 1846 (some report the year as 1848) and asked Michael Knoedler to assume control of the branch in 1852, which he did. By 1857 Knoedler had bought Goupil’s New York location and continued to operate under the Goupil name. Knoedler died of tuberculosis in 1878 (Goupil retired in 1884), but the gallery that carried Knoedler’s name made art history. On Goupil, see Agnes Pénot, La maison Goupil: Galerie d’art international au XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions Mars et Martin, 2017). See also Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (Autumn 2012), https://bit.ly/3joRrN6; and Anne Helmreich, “The Goupil Gallery at the Intersection between London, Continent, and Empire,” in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939, ed. Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 65–84. »

22 In 1883 the art trade in the United States was drastically affected by the tariffs imposed on imported foreign art. In March of that year, the U.S. Congress raised the customs duty from 10 to 30 percent, and it was only through a loophole in the law, allowing dealers to bring works in temporarily, that Durand-Ruel could afford to hold his first exhibitions of impressionist art in Boston (1883) and New York (1886). »

23 On Reid, see Frances Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin: The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid (1854–1928) (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2010). »

24 On the Scottish artists at Grez, see Kenneth McConkey, “From Grez to Glasgow; French Naturalist Influence in Scottish Painting,” Scottish Art Review 15, no. 4 (1982): 16–23. On the Swedish colony at Grez, see Alexandra Herlitz, Grez sur Loing Revisited: The International Artists’ Colony in a Different Light (Göteborg: Markadam, 2013). »

25 On American impressionism, see Katherine M. Bourguignon, ed., American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1900 (Paris: Hazan, 2014), with essays by Richard Brettell and Frances Fowle. On Boston collectors, see Erica E. Hirshler, Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting (London: Royal Academy, 2005). »

26 Richard R. Brettell, “Monet’s Haystacks Reconsidered,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 15. »

27 Gloria Groom, “Vollard and German Collectors,” in Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, ed. Rebecca A. Rabinow (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), 232. »

28 Groom, “Vollard and German Collectors,” 234–36. »

29 On Vollard’s Russian clients, see Albert Kostenevich, “Russian Clients of Ambroise Vollard,” in Rabinow, Cézanne to Picasso, 243–56. »

30 On the Davies sisters, see Mark Evans, “The Davies Sisters of Llandinam and Impressionism for Wales 1908–1923,” Journal of the History of Collections 16, no. 2 (2004): 219–53; Robert Meyrick, “Hugh Blaker: Doing His Bit for the Moderns,” Journal of the History of Collections 16, no. 2 (2004): 173–89. »

31 See Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981). »

32 Brettell, “Monet’s Haystacks Reconsidered.” »

33 On Barnes, see Colin B. Bailey, “The Origins of the Barnes Collection 1912–15,” in “Collectors and Collecting,” special issue, Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1265 (August 2008): 534–43. »

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