The light floods the Kankakee marshes as well as the meadows and willows of Giverny.

(Hamlin Garland)

Impressionism’s adoption by artists in the United States was neither immediate nor inevitable. The first French impressionist exhibition (in)famously took place 150 years ago in Paris, on April 15, 1874. American audiences, however, did not receive widespread exposure to their work until over a decade later at the well-attended New York exhibition Works in oil and pastel by the impressionists of Paris, a showcase of 289 works organized by Paul Durand-Ruel in 1886. It would be easy to blame geographic distance for the movement’s slow burn in the states, but the ideological hurdles proved just as troublesome. George Inness referred to the flattened pictorial planes of impressionism as “the original pancake of visual imbecility”; critic and chemist Helen Abbott Michael, while lauding Claude Monet’s overall genius, still found his work to be “unbearable as a companion”, infused as it was with what she perceived to be a kind of agnostic hopelessness.

Among the skeptical hordes, however, were a few curious visionaries. Robert Vonnoh had just returned from Paris after studying more traditional academic modes at the Académie Julian when he saw Boston’s Foreign exhibition in 1883. The show was a smorgasbord of international art and manufactured goods which featured several works by impressionists like Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and it was enough to prompt Vonnoh to turn the boat around to the art colony of Grez-Sur-Loing. William Glackens, known almost exclusively at the outset of his career for his shadowy, brooding realism, left his dark period behind almost as soon as he found the work of Auguste Renoir, becoming, as one critic put it, “a violent Impressionist overnight”. Theodore Earl Butler may have taken it the farthest of all—he met Monet while he was in Paris in 1888, became one of two American artists to be invited into his inner circle at Giverny (the other being Theodore Robinson), then in 1892 married Monet’s stepdaughter Suzanne Hoschedé, who was also Monet’s favorite model for his paintings following the death of his wife Camille.

Like a hydrangea changing color in response to new soil, the impressionism these American artists brought home wasn’t the same as the impressionism they left behind. They formed their own rebellious factions (The eight, The ten) and burgeoning artist colonies in Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Shinnecock, and Rockport. Though comparisons to the French were unavoidable (Glackens was known as the “American Renoir”; Old Lyme, Connecticut was dubbed the “American Giverny”), the differences that marked impressionism as distinctly “American” were subtle but crucial.

For one, French impressionism firmly embraced the technological aspects of modernity—electric lights, steam engines, and industrial factories made frequent appearances in their paintings, and their compositional framing reflected the asymmetry of a camera’s snapshot. Impressionists in the United States, by contrast, tended to turn their gaze away from city and soot, opting for idyllic New England countrysides and portraits of genteel women among bursts of flowers and well-appointed domiciles. The fleeting brushstrokes and visible daubs of high-keyed color denoted the lessons these repatriates had learned abroad, clearly linking them to their French counterparts. But there was also an undeniable tranquility in these works that felt new. One hardly hears the rattle of the loom in Robert Reid’s hazy lake scenes, or the moonlit forests of Robert Vonnoh.

This pervasive calm, rather than revealing American impressionism to be a subdued version of its predecessor, was actually more reflective of the specific timbres of secularism in American versus French societies. That note of godlessness Helen Abbott Michael saw in Monet’s paintings speaks to the violent ruptures between religion and scientific thought France was undergoing in the 1870s and onward under the French Third Republic; the visual language of French impressionism demonstrated a dramatic turn toward a more rational and dispassionate way of viewing modern life. As the turn of the century approached, the United States did not lack this atmosphere of fracture and doubt, fueled by ever-increasing growth and industrialization. But it was tempered both by an going search for a unified national identity in the wake of the Civil War as well as Emersonian calls to meditate on the divine beauty of the fleeting moment, to see with the mind rather than being swept into the stream of sensorial overabundance of the eye. American impressionism, in a way, was the quasi-religious answer to France’s more jarring loss of faith.

It’s possible no American impressionist embodied this particular Transcendentalist intersection of timelessness and change more than John Henry Twachtman. In 1885, while studying in France, he wrote to his friend and fellow artist Julian Alden Weir: “I hardly know what will take [the] place of my weekly visit to the Louvre. Perhaps patriotism”. Homegrown inspiration would materialize in the form of the farm in Greenwich, Connecticut that he purchased in 1890. If Monet had his serializations of haystacks and cathedrals, Twachtman had Horseneck Brook. In every light and every season, he acted as witness, pulling a silvery spirituality from the land and delicately laying it down on canvas; it is the brisk now of impressionism suffused with the serene opacity of tonalism. The light of France’s impressionism will change, will die. In America, that tangible moment instead hangs in eternity.