The Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College is pleased to present “American Visions: Selections from the Young Collection of American Impressionist and Realist Paintings.” The opening reception will be held in the Williamson Gallery, on Saturday, November 4, from 7-9 p.m., and the exhibition continues until December 17.
This exhibition celebrates the 60th anniversary of a major gift to Scripps College of 59 American paintings, dating from 1870 to 1930, which illuminate the American artistic scene at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. During this time of artistic change, artists moved from the French-influenced style of impressionism to an emerging American mode of realism. The gift of paintings came to Scripps in 1946 from General and Mrs. Edward Clinton Young, who became interested in the arts and humanities curriculum at Scripps through their friendship with artist Millard Sheets, the popular regionalist painter who built the Art Department at Scripps. General Young, who graduated from West Point in 1887, served in World War I, and retired from a business career in 1928. From 1922 to 1933, General and Mrs. Young assembled their collection of American art, and in 1940 moved from the East Coast to Sierra Madre, CA. At the age of 84, General Young presented their collection to Scripps College.
The Young Collection focuses on American impressionism and realism, movements that span two centuries and mark different phases in the response of American artists to European art. The American impressionists, who were active from approximately 1880 until 1915, looked to French impressionism, which had rejected the Academy’s emphasis on historical subjects and polished surfaces. The French impressionists and their American followers painted modern life, working directly on the canvas and rendering their subjects with loose brushwork. The American realists, who emerged around 1900, remained committed to painting modern life, but they broke away from the leisure subjects and light tones of impressionism. Instead, they created an art of urban themes and deep tonalities, which became identified with the realist movement in the early part of the century. Several of these artists began their artistic careers as magazine and newspaper illustrators, occupations that focused them on the darker side of city life and later led critics to sarcastically dub them the Ashcan School.
The Youngs, who preferred landscape painting, did not collect the grittier views of city life associated with the Ashcan School; instead, they selected portraits, whose bold brushwork and dark backgrounds look back to Dutch painter Frans Hals (1582-1666) and Spanish painter Diego Velasquez (1599-1660). Realists in the Young collection begin with Winslow Homer, one of the leading American painters of the mid-19th century, and continue with Robert Henri and George Luks, who pioneered a new realist style at the beginning of the 20th century. In his effort to directly convey a sense of emotion, Henri disdained academic painting’s emphasis on finished surfaces. “A thing that is finished is dead,” Henri said, “A thing that has the greatest expression of life itself, however roughly it may be expressed, is in reality the most finished work of art.”
The exhibition features key works from the Young Collection, including figural paintings by John La Farge, Edmund Tarbell, and Maurice Brazil Prendergast, whose moods range from mysterious to lyrical. There are also American impressionist landscapes by Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Ernest Lawson, and John Twachtman, which encompass the four seasons. In addition, there are compelling portraits by such luminaries as Mary Stevenson Cassatt, the only American artist to show with the French impressionists, as well as Robert Henri and George Luks, leading figures in the Ashcan School.
The exhibition has been organized by Mary MacNaughton, Director of the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, and has been designed by Collection Manager Kirk Delman. Scripps students, Clare Heinzelman ’08 and Maggie Tokuda-Hall ’07, Wilson Interns at the Gallery, contributed interpretive texts on the works in the exhibition.
The Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery is located in Claremont, CA, at Eleventh Street and Columbia Avenue, adjacent to Baxter Hall. The Gallery is open to the public, free of charge, Wednesday through Sunday, from 1-5 p.m. For more information, please contact the Gallery at (909) 607-3397.