American Impressionism

William Merritt Chase

William Merritt Chase lived and maintained a studio in New York. Like many of the American artist's of the later half of the 19th Century, he was schooled in an academic fashion in Munich. The prevailing style of painting was tonal based - browns and black neutral tones were used to create the shadows and model the form. The subject matter was largely indoor, figurative work. As he spent more time in Europe he became exposed to the paintings of the Impressionists' and his palette began to brighten. We call this use of lighter colors, painting in a "higher key."

In 1891 Chase opened one of the first outdoor painting schools in the country at Shinnecock, Long Island. By painting outdoors, directly from nature, the lessons of the European impressionists were first brought to our shores.

In 1896 Charles Hawthorne began studying with him and he became his teaching assistant the following year.

Charles Hawthorne

In 1899 Charles Hawthorne established his own outdoor painting school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He is credited with establishing Provincetown as an important art colony which attracted many famous playwrights and authors as well.

Hawthorne is notable in that he isolated the problem of color perception to an even greater degree. His credo was "everything under the sun is beautiful if you have the vision. It's the seeing of the thing that makes it so." He believed in the primacy of the main color relationships over the importance of drawing.

He came up with a system of study that involved the use of a putty knife to apply the paint directly onto a gessoed board. By thwarting the students ability to draw his subject into existence the student was forced to convey his subject through large, simple statements of color. The subject was often the local Portuguese children that he would pose on the beach, sitting on barrels with the sun at their back, creating a striking silhouette. These studies were appropriately called "mudheads." The mud-head part was the shadow portion of the head, and this would be played off against a bright area of color to represent the light plane of the head. Hawthorne accurately saw that it was the proper relationship of the main two areas of color that created the light effect.

Much has been written about "broken color" - juxtaposing two primary colors in small strokes to be blended optically when seen from a distance. It is mistakenly assumed that this is the way an impressionist painter produces a light effect. While broken color is often used to create a large area of color (or a mass), it is only the relationship of the masses that produces the light effect.

Henry Hensche

Henry Hensche, my teacher, studied with Hawthorne in the 1920s and became his teaching assistant in 1928. He taught with Hawthorne until 1930, the year Hawthorne died. In 1931 Henry opened his own painting school, calling it the Cape School of Art. He carried on the tradition of outdoor instruction as taught to him by Hawthorne.

Over time Henry took the simplification of Hawthorne's concept of instruction step further. He had the beginning student paint colored blocks of wood on a table in full sunlight. This reduced the problem of color perception to it's absolute essence. What was the color of the light in relation to the color of the shade plane and the cast shadow? Hawthorne's putty knife had by this time given way to a more painter-friendly painting knife, but the emphasis was still squarely on the side of painting as opposed to drawing.

After the beginner achieved the look of sunlight in his paintings Henry then encouraged his students to tackle more complex forms. The student was encouraged to break down the initial masses into what he referred to as the major variations of color. This process was repeated to a finer and finer degree, thereby modeling the form with minute color variations. In his own paintings this was taken to an extremely high level and he produced paintings that have not been equaled for their color modeling.

Hensche often repeated Cezanne's dictum, "every form change is a color change". It is this insistence on the fidelity to form while still creating the envelope of light that marks him clearly as an American Impressionist.

Back to Abigail's Homepage