Collection: The Studio of Nature, 1860-1910. The Terra Collection in Context

Musée des impressionnismes Giverny

July 10, 2020 – November 1, 2020

This exhibition of more than fifty canvases, lithographs and watercolours, presented by the musée des impressionnismes Giverny, provides a wide-ranging overview of American landscape painting during the time of the French Impressionists, shedding light on its development.

The exhibition opens with the final period of the Hudson River School, featuring landscapes and seascapes executed in the 1870s in a meticulous, precise style.

At the end of the 18th century, several artists stayed in France, where they began sketching outdoors. It was at this time that the first American artists settled in Giverny, the village where Claude Monet lived. There they gradually abandoned the style of the Barbizon School for the brighter colours and freer brushwork of Impressionism.

When they returned to the United States, they continued to produce luminous landscapes inspired by Impressionism, while also developing a harsher realist style that heralded a new approach to painting at the beginning of the 20th century.