“Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. The word ‘impression’ as applied to art…really means the only truth because it means going straight to nature for inspiration and not allowing tradition to dictate your brush…The true impressionism is realism.”

Childe Hassam’s 1892 statement defines the essence of art as its ability to accurately describe the natural world. According to Hassam, this veracity relies on an artist’s physical and perceptual proximity to the landscape, on the immediacy of their translation of nature from its observed reality to its rendering in paint. At the turn of the twentieth century, the American landscape took on renewed currency as an artistic subject as widespread industrialization and urbanization threatened to irrevocably alter its wild and seemingly limitless nature. In the Northeast, artists left the metropolitan centers of New York and Boston for provincial New England and the Hudson River Valley, where they found inspiration, revitalization, and community in the diverse landscapes they encountered.

Organized geographically, this installation of twenty-four works from the Bruce Museum’s permanent collection considers how artistic approaches to landscape were informed both by avant-garde experimentation and the particularities of place. Hassam’s use of the word “impression,” for example, is significant given his adoption of Impressionist technique. In Connecticut—where he worked on and off for nearly three decades—rolling pastures, sun-dappled woodlands, and serene coastlines lent themselves to explorations of the effects of light and weather. Embracing the high-keyed hues and rapid brushstrokes of French Impressionism, Hassam and other members of the artists’ colonies at Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Mystic, and Silvermine captured fleeting records of their bucolic surroundings by painting en plein air, or outdoors. This modernist language also spoke to artists in the harbor towns of Gloucester and Rockport, Massachusetts, while views of New York’s Hudson River engendered a muted approach. With limited variations in tone and facture of paint, artists registered subtle atmospheric shifts in the waterway’s appearance at different times of day. For an earlier generation, the salt marshes outside Newburyport, Massachusetts, rocky coastline of Maine, and tidal patterns along the New Jersey shore inspired a highly polished mode of painting, combining careful composition and invisible brushwork to produce meticulously rendered landscapes. By linking place with painterly practice, this installation underscores the significance of nature to modernism’s stylistic development in the Northeast in the decades around 1900.

Nature’s Impressions: The Modernist Landscape is organized by the Bruce Museum and curated by Jordan Hillman, Curatorial Associate.

Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) 
Sunlight on Newbury Marshes, circa 1865–1875
Oil on canvas, 13 x 26 in.
Bruce Museum, Gift of Alice and L. Thomas Melly, 2023.03

Childe Hassam (American, 1859–1935)
The Mill Pond, Cos Cob, 1902
Oil on canvas 26 ¼ x 18 ¼ in.
Bruce Museum, 94.25

Matilda Browne (American, 1869–1947)
August Morning, circa 1919
Oil on canvas, 24 x 32 in.
Bruce Museum, 00026

Henry Ward Ranger (American, 1858–1916) 
Untitled (seascape), n.d.
Oil on canvas, 18 x 25 ¾ in.
Bruce Museum, Gift of the estate of Katherine S. Deutsch, 91.13