waltzintheflowers:

Reading in art

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The National Academy Museum and School, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the “National Academy” – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, and others “to promote the fine arts in America through instruction and exhibition.” Its museum houses a public collection of over 7,000 works of American art from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

The Academy has had several homes over the years. Notable among them was a building built during 1863-1865, designed by architect P. B. Wight in Venetian Gothic style, which was modeled on the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Another locale was at West 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. Since 1942 the academy has occupied a mansion that was the former home of sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington and Archer Milton Huntington at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street.

The school offers studio instruction, master classes, intensive critiques, various workshops, and lunchtime lectures. Scholarships are available.

Members of the National Academy may be identified using the post-nominal “NA” (National Academician). One cannot apply for membership.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Society of American Artists was an American artists group. It was formed in 1877 by artists who felt the National Academy of Design did not adequately meet their needs, and was too conservative.

The group began meeting in 1874 at the home of Richard Watson Gilder and his wife Helena de Kay Gilder. In 1877 they formed the Society, and subsequently held annual art exhibitions.

Some of the first members included sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose work had been rejected from a National Academy exhibition in 1877; painters Walter Shirlaw, Robert Swain Gifford, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John LaFarge, Julian Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, and Alexander Helwig Wyant; and designer and artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Eventually most of the best-known artists of the day joined the group, and many held dual membership with the National Academy.

The cycle of conservative to progressive repeated in 1897 when the Ten American Painters group broke away from the Society of American Artists. The Society ultimately merged with the National Academy in 1906.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Ten American Painters, generally known as The Ten, were a group of painters who left the Society of American Artists in late 1897 due to what they perceived as the placement of mediocre artists in leadership positions, a devaluation of Impressionism versus Classicism and Romantic Realism, unimaginative and crowded displays of paintings in exhibitions, and the general lack of continuity in exhibition quality. They also felt that the Society’s exhibitions were too commercial in nature.

The organizing forces behind the Ten were Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, and John Henry Twachtman. Robert Reid, Willard Metcalf, Frank Weston Benson, Edmund C. Tarbell, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp, and Edward Simmons rounded out their number. Winslow Homer was asked to join the group when it was formed, but refused. Abbott Handerson Thayer did briefly join, but then changed his mind.

When Twachtman died in 1902, William Merritt Chase joined the Ten in his place.

All of The Ten were active in either New York City or Boston. They were generally considered exponents of Impressionism and established in their careers. Although against formal rules, on December 17, 1897, they officially agreed that no fewer than ten artists would be members at any time, and each of these would contribute to every annual exhibition. New members could only be accepted into the group if all existing members were unanimously in favor.

A month later, on January 8 1898, they announced their secession from the Society of American Artists—a move that garnered considerable media attention. For its part, the Society claimed it was “liberal” with dissenters, but some members felt it should stand for “traditional art” and not vacillate with each passing art movement. It was content to let dissenters leave rather than try to appease them.

The Ten held annual exhibitions for twenty years; eventually the group fell apart from deaths among the members and as their art was deemed reactionary in comparison with Urban Realism and other movements which came to the public’s attention.

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Ten American Painters (The Ten), 1908, by Haeseler Photographic Studios, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Photograph Archives, Washington, D. C.

Seated, left to right: Edward Simmons, Willard L. Metcalf, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid

Standing, left to right: William Merritt Chase, Frank W. Benson, Edmund C. Tarbell, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp

drawpaintprint:

Arques-la-Bataille, 1885
John Henry Twachtman (American, 1853–1902)
Oil on canvas

At the Seaside, ca. 1892
William Merritt Chase (American, 1849–1916)
Oil on canvas

Low Tide, Riverside Yacht Club, 1894
Theodore Robinson (American, 1852–1896)
Oil on canvas

The North Country, 1923
Willard Metcalf (American, 1858–1925)
Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum:

After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the United States gained unprecedented international political and economic status. American art patrons—notably Northerners who had made fortunes from the war—traveled abroad and imbibed European culture. To announce their wealth and sophistication, they built grand houses and filled them with imported decorative arts and paintings by old masters and contemporary academics. To appeal to prospective patrons, aspiring American artists studied in Europe, especially Paris.

Soon after Americans began earnestly to collect and emulate European art, the

French Impressionists made their debut in a private exhibition in Paris in 1874; they would show together eight times in all, until 1886. Rejecting the academics’ devotion to invented subjects and meticulous technique, Impressionist painters depicted landscapes and intimate scenes of everyday middle-class life using natural light, rapid brushwork, and a high-keyed palette. Young Americans in Paris in the 1870s, studying with academic teachers such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, ignored Impressionism. The few who took note of the radical style were repelled. After visiting the third group exhibition in the spring of 1877, J. Alden Weir wrote to his parents: “I never in my life saw more horrible things…. They do not observe drawing nor form but give you an impression of what they call nature. It was worse than the Chamber of Horrors.”

There were exceptions to the American disdain of Impressionism during its early years. Pennsylvania-born Mary Cassatt, who moved to Paris in 1874, was sympathetic. Her work attracted the attention of Edgar Degas, who, in 1877, invited her to exhibit with the group. John Singer Sargent, born in Florence to expatriate American parents and studying in Paris by 1874, met Claude Monet two years later and was inspired by him and his colleagues to paint lively urban scenes.

During the mid-1880s, as French Impressionism lost its radical edge, American collectors began to value the style, and more American artists began to experiment with it after absorbing academic fundamentals. Exhibitions of Impressionist works were held in American cities and sales were strong. In 1886, with a series of brilliant images of New York’s new public parks, William Merritt Chase became the first major American painter to create Impressionist canvases in the United States. At about the same time, Americans began to visit artists’ colonies that centered on outdoor painting, most notably Giverny, where Monet had settled in 1883. Those who sought inspiration there included Sargent, Willard Metcalf, and Theodore Robinson, who transmitted Monet’s ideas to his compatriots back in the United States.

By the early 1890s, Impressionism was firmly established as a valid style of painting for American artists. Even Weir was a convert. Most of the repatriated American Impressionists lived in the Northeast, tapping into the cultural energy that was increasingly concentrated in New York. Some of them taught in the new art schools that were a consequence of the growing professionalism; others conducted summer classes dedicated to Impressionism, as Chase did on the east end of Long Island from 1891 until 1902 and as John Henry Twachtman did in Cos Cob, Connecticut, during the 1890s.

The American Impressionists were much more cosmopolitan than their French counterparts. Several were expatriates or spent long periods in Europe; those who repatriated often crossed the Atlantic to attend exhibitions, visit museums, and work in artists’ colonies. In Europe and the United States, the American Impressionists witnessed the transformation from an agrarian to an industrialized urban society. They were simultaneously excited by change and nostalgic for the reassuring and familiar past.

While some American artists adopted only the surface effects of Impressionism, simply to accommodate collectors’ evolving taste, many of them shared the French Impressionists’ conviction that modern life should be recorded in a vibrant modern style. Their works, like those of their French counterparts, appear to be infused not only with light and color but with meanings inherent in the subjects they depicted. Some were captivated by the energy of urban life, responding to the fragmented experience that marked the age in rapidly rendered vignettes. Childe Hassam, for example, caught the flavor of characteristic neighborhoods in New York and Paris. But most American Impressionists chose to portray the countryside to which urbanites like themselves and their patrons retreated. Many favored artists’ colonies, especially those with architecture and activities that evoked a more tranquil era. In England, for example, Sargent found respite from the portrait studio by painting pastoral scenes in Broadway, a charming village in the Cotswolds. Repatriated Impressionists founded and frequented similarly picturesque colonies: the Isles of Shoals, off the New Hampshire coast, where Hassam painted, and Southampton, New York, where Chase taught and worked. Some American Impressionists worked alone in other distinctive rural locales. Twachtman found inspiration on his farm in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Vignettes of domestic life also engaged the American Impressionists. Cassatt, Edmund Tarbell, Frank W. Benson, and others often depicted women and children in tranquil interiors and gardens that ignored or denied the epochal changes taking place beyond their walls.

Many American artists worked in the Impressionist style into the 1920s, but innovation had long since waned. By 1910, the less genteel approach of urban realists known as the Ashcan School had emerged. In 1913, the immense display of avant-garde European art at the Armory Show made even the Ashcan School seem old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the American Impressionists’ focus on familiar subjects and rapid technique left an indelible mark on American painting. Their works bear witness to their creators’ experiences abroad and at home, and offer tantalizing reflections of a dynamic period as well as enchanting records of color and light.

H. Barbara Weinberg
Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wilhelm Leibl - Porträit des jungen Rembrandt van Rijn/Portrait of the young Rembrandt - 19th century

Wilhelm Leibl - Porträt des Malers Sattler mit seiner Dogge/The Painter Sattler with his Dog - 1870

Wilhelm Leibl - The Painter Fritz Paulsen - 1870

midnightskywalker:

“Self-portrait: Memento mori”

Arnold Böcklin- Selbstbildnis mit fiedelndem Tod, 1872
Salvator Rosa, 1647
Hans Thoma (1839 - 1924)
Luigi Russolo, Self-Portrait, 1909
Johan Zoffany, Zoffani or Zauffelij (13 March 1733 – 11 November 1810), 1776
Thomas Smith, 1680
Albrecht Bouts, 1451-55
Stevan Aleksić, 1919

Wilhelm Leibl - The Painter Carl Schuch (German: Der Maler Carl Schuch), 1876

Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Wilhelm Maria Hubertus Leibl (October 23, 1844 – December 4, 1900) was a German realist painter of portraits and scenes of peasant life.

Carl Eduard Schuch (30 September 1846 – 13 September 1903) was an Austrian painter, born in Vienna, who spent most of his lifetime outside Austria, in Germany, Italy and France. He painted primarily still lifes and landscapes.