Americans in Paris, 1860–1900

During the late nineteenth century Paris grew dramatically, drawing citizens from all over France as well as foreign visitors and expatriates. In 1853, the year after Emperor Napoleon III ascended the throne, he hired the civic planner Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann to transform the ancient capital into a modern metropolis. After the city was besieged and badly damaged during the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune in 1870–71, its renovation resumed during the Third Republic. The uniform height and human scale of many of its buildings, along with the Seine winding through its center, gave Paris a distinctive, harmonious appearance that was enhanced by tree-lined boulevards that Haussmann ruthlessly cut through old neighborhoods, grand vistas terminating in impressive monuments, and hospitable parks, refurbished squares, and verdant promenades. Statuary, redecorated churches and public structures, and the luxurious new Opéra underscored the city's cultural authority and its commitment to art and good taste.

Aware that the time they had in Paris was precious, most Americans devoted themselves to their studies. Yet many responded to the city's beauty and dynamism and recorded its emblematic sites in quick sketches and more complex exhibition pictures. Other painters were drawn to its myriad entertainments—its lively concerts, theaters, and cafés—which they usually depicted from the audience's point of view, thus implying their own roles as visiting spectators.

Americans were entranced by two stereotypes about the artist's life in Paris—the impecunious bohemian and the self-confident flâneur. Painters often adopted one of these distinctively Parisian personas in their self-portraits or in their depictions of one another, thus claiming for themselves a certain cosmopolitan sophistication.

The bohemian ideal was first characterized by the French writer Henri Murger during the 1840s. In a series of magazine articles based on his own experiences, Murger told stories in which artists sacrifice creature comforts in order to devote themselves to their muse. His tales were turned into a successful musical in 1849, published as a book in 1851, and translated into English in 1888. Murger's stories inspired Giacomo Puccini's popular 1896 opera La Bohéme and continued to captivate Americans for decades.

Described by Charles Baudelaire in his essays of the 1850s, the flâneur was a modern character, "a gentleman stroller of the city streets." Consummately well dressed, he was a man-about-town, an impartial observer of contemporary urban life.

American artists, who formed the largest contingent of foreign painters and sculptors in Paris, were only one segment of the capital's extensive American colony, which also included writers, businessmen, diplomats, and others in more-or-less permanent residence. Many American artists stayed together, and enclaves of them developed on the Left Bank, along the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and near the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian's headquarters.

Several American artists moved easily within French society. They were fluent in French and thus able to interact with their French colleagues, to keep up with current criticism and events, and to feel comfortable reading a novel, attending the theater, or participating in a social engagement. Although some lived in Paris for long periods—even the rest of their lives—most insisted on identifying themselves as American.

Life at home in Paris provided several painters with subjects for their brush. Julius LeBlanc Stewart achieved notice for a series of pictures of Parisian society, while Mary Fairchild recorded more modest images of everyday life. Mary Cassatt was completely at ease in Paris. French-speaking, independent, fiercely devoted to her work, and committed to making a living as an artist despite her wealth, she was the only American member of the French Impressionist group, showing with them four times between 1879 and 1886. She made the home her most frequent subject, applying her modern painting technique to traditional domestic themes.

Recognition from the Paris art world was central to almost every artist's plans—even if he or she had returned home after studying there or had never studied there at all. Nowhere but Paris could an artist be judged according to the highest standards and earn credentials that would ensure future success. Criticism flourished, with many French newspapers and journals providing lengthy reviews. Their comments were picked up by the American press, which also covered Paris exhibitions extensively.

The annual Salons were showcases for thousands of paintings and sculptures that were seen by tens of thousands of visitors. Pictures reflecting an inevitably miscellaneous mix of subjects and styles were usually installed frame-to-frame and from floor to ceiling in immense galleries. Artists competed fiercely for admission, position, and prizes, all of which were controlled by juries of leading masters.

The official Salon was administered by the French government through 1880 and by the Société des Artistes Français thereafter. In response to artists' complaints about a particularly rigid jury in 1863, Napoleon III authorized a Salon des Refusés, the first of a handful of such exhibitions of rejected works. In 1890 the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts organized a second, slightly more liberal Salon to challenge the established annual exhibition.

Recognition from the Paris art world was central to almost every artist's plans—even if he or she had returned home after studying there or had never studied there at all. Nowhere but Paris could an artist be judged according to the highest standards and earn credentials that would ensure future success. Criticism flourished, with many French newspapers and journals providing lengthy reviews. Their comments were picked up by the American press, which also covered Paris exhibitions extensively.

The annual Salons were showcases for thousands of paintings and sculptures that were seen by tens of thousands of visitors. Pictures reflecting an inevitably miscellaneous mix of subjects and styles were usually installed frame-to-frame and from floor to ceiling in immense galleries. Artists competed fiercely for admission, position, and prizes, all of which were controlled by juries of leading masters.

The official Salon was administered by the French government through 1880 and by the Société des Artistes Français thereafter. In response to artists' complaints about a particularly rigid jury in 1863, Napoleon III authorized a Salon des Refusés, the first of a handful of such exhibitions of rejected works. In 1890 the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts organized a second, slightly more liberal Salon to challenge the established annual exhibition.

By July, after the Salon season had ended, American painters in Paris, like their international counterparts, sought respite from the city's art scene and summer heat. They settled temporarily in picturesque rural villages that were redolent of tradition, old-fashioned values, and spiritual authenticity.

Most of the alluring country retreats were in the suburbs or in Normandy and Brittany. They were all easily accessible, first by railroad to a larger nearby town and then by horse-drawn vehicle or on foot-journeys that in themselves signified beguiling transitions from the present to the past. These bucolic locales invited artists to work outdoors in the company of like-minded colleagues and to live for a while as bohemians in pastoral calm, even to don wooden clogs and straw hats as practical—and symbolic—accessories. Key attractions were modest living costs, cheap accommodations, and farmers, fisherfolk, and other local types who were willing to pose for a few sous. "The life in the open air, together with the absorbing, delightful occupation of painting from nature, followed by the pleasant reunions in the evening, constituted an ideal existence to which I know no parallel," recalled one artist.

The colonies that developed in some of these rustic communities—Barbizon, Pont-Aven, Grez-sur-Loing, and Giverny, for example—attracted dozens of artists each summer and a few who bought houses, built studios, and remained for years. In the countryside, painters made sketches for later reference or completed more ambitious canvases on the spot. The ultimate goals were works for exhibition—perhaps in the next year's Salon—and sale.

Many American painters were drawn to Giverny, the ancient Norman farming hamlet on the Seine, about fifty-three miles northwest of Paris, where Claude Monet had settled in April 1883. John Singer Sargent, the only American known to have been acquainted with Monet before traveling to the village, apparently visited in mid-summer 1885. Willard Metcalf, who is said to have discovered Giverny by chance in 1885, made his first extended visit in September 1886 and was joined there by several Americans in summer 1887. As early as October 1887 a writer for Art Amateur could marvel: "Quite an American colony has gathered, I am told, at Givernay [sic]. . . . A few pictures just received from these young men show that they have all got the blue-green color of Monet's impressionism and 'got it bad.'" Although Monet set an artistic example for the Americans at Giverny, he avoided most of them and even threatened in March 1892 to sell his house and leave the village because of the attention two of them were paying to his stepdaughters. Giverny would continue to flourish as a rural retreat for American painters until about 1915.

When they returned to the United States, artists worked to reconcile the lessons they had learned in Paris with American subjects and taste. Examples by Thomas Eakins, James Carroll Beckwith, and Cecilia Beaux on view earlier in the exhibition suggest some of their strategies. This gallery focuses on American Impressionism, the style that enabled many repatriated artists to announce their cosmopolitanism while also responding to the growing sense of national identity that emerged in the 1890s.

Like their French mentors, the American Impressionists maintained that personal experience was the only appropriate source for subjects, which should be transcribed freshly and directly. Thus, they recorded burgeoning American cities and familiar rural locales, especially in New England, a region that evoked reassuring historical associations in a time of bewildering change. The Americans created a distinctive version of Impressionism, often combining the solid, substantial forms they had learned to paint in Parisian academies with a new interest in natural light, luminous color, and flickering brushwork. This stylistic duality is conspicuous in American Impressionist figure paintings, many of which also announce the national preference for a genteel, wholesome feminine ideal.