California Impressionists Paperback – July 6, 1996

Beautiful book for my collection! Anyone who loves California Impressionist art will appreciate this volume!

This book could be a little bigger, both in number of images and size of plates. But, the plates are still a reasonable size. The paintings are reproduced in beautiful color, detail, and brightness/contrast. The price is fantastic. This is a really fine introduction to California Impressionism at a price that leaves nothing to be complained about. A very nice addition to our art library.

Mostly beautiful plates. Not too much on the history of the California plein air artists.

I was tranported into their time of a magical representational art form

Great book!! Loved it beautiful pictures of paintings! Made good.

An interesting historical read and artwork beautifully illustrated. The book is helpful to artists interested in the impressionistic landscape.

I love this book. It came on time and in very good condition. The pictures have terriffic color and a wide expanse of items.

As a Californian transplanted to the East I loved the nostalgic feelings engendered to me by this true representation of the feel of California.

1996 was the year of the Atlanta Olympic Games and, as part of the parallel Cultural Olympiad, the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia and the Irving Museum, Irving, California, organized an exhibition, `California Impressionists', which this catalogue accompanies. The Irvine Museum has the specific aim of preserving and displaying Californian Impressionist art.The exhibition comprised 59 works that are illustrated in colour, their general bright colouration reflecting the light and airiness of the state. Three essays are presented: "Impressionism's Indian Summer: The Culture and Composition of California `Plein-Air' Painting" by Susan Landauer, "From Giverny to Laguna Beach", Donald D. Keyes, and "The California Impressionist Style in Perspective", by Jean Stern; these are accompanied by 17 coloured and b/w figures. The catalogue also contains a Selected Bibliography. A brief biographical summary of the artists would have been very helpful.The catalogue does not differentiate between painters from Northern and Southern California despite the fact that they are usually considered separately. Moreover, the term `Impressionists' is defined in a broad manner to include both Tonalists, who were at the forefront of Northern Californian painting until the early 1920s, and early Modernists. Even though they were stylistically ahead of their Northern colleagues, when artists from Los Angeles, Laguna Beach and San Diego were caught up in the fervor of Impressionism, Parisian art had already passed through the Fauvist, Cubist and Futurist movements. The all-year-round warmth of the climate, the multitude of landscape and seascape opportunities, and the wealth generated by railroads and tourism some of which was used for acquiring art were all reasons contributing to the numbers of artists, native visiting and settling.The shoreline was a popular motif, as in "Pacific Grove Shoreline", c. 1915, by Ernest Bruce Nelson, which might be regarded as a typical rendering of the effect of Californian light on rocks and blue sea, "Mid-Winter, Coronado Beach", c. 1907, showing fashionable families on the beach, whilst William Ritschel's undated "Mammouth Cove", uses an elevated position to look down onto sheer cliff faces. Guy Rose followed Monet in painting the same subject in differing weather conditions, as in the undated "Point Lobos" that shows small trees clinging desperately to the rocks just above the sea. Away from the coast, the daily hard work continued, as in Armin Hansen's "The Farm House", 1915, William Wendt's ramshackle "Untitled Landscape", undated, and E. Charlton Fortune's "The Cabbage Patch", c. 1914.Wild flowers, including Californian poppies, were a feature of many works, including John Gamble's undated "Joyous Spring", where the poppies are contrasted with purple lupines. The same flowers are painted by Granville Redmond in his undated "Flowers under the Oaks", Landauer says that this combination was so popular that the artist could scarcely keep up with demand. "Pasadena", undated, by Benjamin C. Brown takes the contrast to a dizzying pitch.During Hassam's visit to the state he painted "The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate", 1914, which records the `silver veil' of the sea fog descending on blurred mountains. Redmond's "Silver and Gold", 1918, contrasts a swath of poppies with the sunlit sea, and references the State's golden image. It is even possible to beautify a polluted harbour and low-lying smog, as Sam Hyde Harris managed to do in his undated "Todd Shipyards, San Pedro".Windswept trees, a feature of Californian coastline were recorded by Edgar Payne in "Sentinels of the Coast, Monterey", undated, Mary DeNeale Morgan in her undated "Cypress at Monterey", Marion Kavanagh Wachtel in her undated "Enchanted Isle", whilst as late as 1930, Arthur Mathews was using broken brushwork to convey the light and heat of "California in Monterey Cypress". Gnarled inland trees were painted separately by Elmer and Marion Wachtel in their undated works "Golden Autumn, Cajon Pass", and "Untitled Landscape", respectively. The rugged beauty of the inland valleys and mountains in nowhere recorded better than in Hanson Puthuff's "Transient Shadows", c. 1926.As was the case for the French Impressionists, portraits formed a significant proportion of the Californian painters' work, examples in the exhibition including Guy Rose's japoniste "The Green Parasol", c. 1909, and "The Model", c. 1919, and Colin Cambell Cooper's undated "Two Women".