The Impressionist movement is identified with an independent initiative by the Private Company of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc., who organized eight group shows between 1874 and 1886, bypassing France's official Salon system. The critic and painter Louis Leroy (1812-1885) used the term "Impressionist" disparagingly, mocking the lack of finish in works like Claude Monet (1840-1926) Impressionism, Sunrise (1872), but also condemning the insolence of the young artists who exhibited. American artists who are called Impressionists do have some connections to Monet and the members of the Private Company of Artists. Landscape painters such as the much younger Bucks County painter Edward Redfield (1869-1965) painted en plein-air, observing directly from nature, a practice associated with Monet and the Impressionists. American artists such as Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts [PAFA] faculty member, Robert Vonnoh, gathered at international colonies like Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, and brought back to the United States the experimental radical artistic ideas of the French Impressionists. The small village of Giverny, home of Monet after 1883, became a center of American Impressionism closely connected to his landscapes and color ideas, which was frequented by Theodore Robinson (1852-1896) and Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933). Paris studios, the colonies at Grez-sur-Loing and Giverny, support for American Impressionism at PAFA, fostered a rich network that reached its heydey between the 1890s and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Suggested reading:
Bourguingnon, Katherine M., ed. Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Exhibition catalog.
Gerdts, William H. American Impressionism. 2nd ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 2001.
Peterson, Brian H., ed. Pennsylvania Impressionism. Philadelphia and Doylestown: James A. Michener Art Museum and University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Exhibition catalog.
Weinberg, H. Barbara. “American Impressionism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aimp/hd_aimp.htm (October 2004)
Theodore Robinson, Low Tide, Riverside Yacht Club, 1894--Image belongs to Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/19523