Inside/Outside

The Reading Museum explores American Impressionism through a comparison of interior scenes and landscapes painted in plein air

- Sarah Gianelli

Impressionism didn’t firmly take hold in America until the mid-1880s, by which time the radical nature of its emergence in France had dissipated, and the disdain with which it was met by the Western art world was replaced by acceptance and eventual embrace. There were American artists painting alongside the French Impressionists as early as the mid-1870s, notably Mary Cassatt who moved to Paris in 1874 where she caught the eye of Edgar Degas; and John Singer Sargent, who was studying in Paris at the same time, and would soon meet Claude Monet. But it was William Merritt Chase, with his 1886 series of New York City park scenes, who established himself as the first major American Impressionist painter.

Chase is one of roughly 15 painters featured in American Impressionism: Inside/ Out, on view at Pennsylvania’s Reading Public Museum through January 5, 2025. Spanning the 1870s through the 1920s, the exhibition features an entire generation of American artists whose work embodies the style that became known as Impressionism. Some of the works were painted by Americans who spent significant time in France and adopted the looser brushwork, brighter color palette and casual subject matter of their French contemporaries, and introduced the modern style to artists on this side of the Atlantic, who then carried it forward into the next century.

As one of the most significant American art movements—marking a revolutionary break from many traditional academic art teachings—and most beloved styles of art, impressionism has been explored in countless books, films and exhibitions. The Reading Public Museum has managed to conceive of a novel approach for their presentation, by looking at interior scenes alongside plein air landscapes.