'Old House, East Hampton,' a 1917 painting by Childe Hassam, is featured in 'In a New Light: American Impressionism 1870–1940, Works from the Bank of America Collection.'
I first fell in love with Impressionist art during a 1991 trip to Paris, where I sat in the Musée d’Orsay and got lost in a painting of pond lilies by Claude Monet. I liked the way it dissolved boundaries between substance and light, inviting me to think about how things are often not fully one way or the other.
Seeing those water lilies reminded me that life is a mysterious mix of qualities, each one of us a miracle precisely because we can’t easily be defined.
I was in one of the world’s most famous cities that afternoon, but I was also struck by how Monet had made his picture from his own garden, not a grand cathedral or boulevard. The more I looked at Monet’s lilies and their vivid halos of purple, yellow and green, the more they seemed to resemble a galaxy floating in space. Monet had cast his eyes on his familiar backyard and glimpsed the infinite.
His paintings point to the promise that we, too, can find revelation wherever we happen to live.
In the decades since my visit to the Musée d’Orsay, I try to see Impressionist paintings wherever I can. It’s a special comfort in winter, when gray days make the vivid colors of Impressionist masters a wonder to warm my hands around.
My most recent odyssey last month took me to Baton Rouge’s LSU Museum of Art, which is hosting “In a New Light,” a survey of American Impressionism, through March 23. A young staffer at the admissions desk welcomed us with a smile, though he added an obligatory request that visitors not touch the paintings.
Entering the gallery, I could see why patrons might be tempted to run their hands across the pictures.
Impressionists tend to be lavish with paint, the strokes so thick that they rise from the canvas as if extending a hand. That was especially true of the brush work in Charles Ebert’s “Autumn Landscape,” where rich dollops of rusty fall colors look almost braided, like ropes of carpet.
One of my favorite paintings in the exhibition is “Old House, East Hampton,” a 1917 oil on linen by Childe Hassam. The sprawling old home in the painting is radiant purple, looking at first glance like a Carnival float with its gaudy hues.
But we assume the house isn’t really purple; it’s the quality of light, perhaps at dusk, that yields the strange effect. I had almost walked away before I noticed another memorable feature of Hassam’s “Old House.”
Look closely, and you’ll see the tiny head of a woman peering from a bottom front window. She wears what appears to be a white bonnet — already a quaint fashion choice, one gathers, when Hassam stood at his easel. She seems cozy inside as just beyond her door, a more daring future blooms.
What’s ahead is the 20th century, in all its messy splendor.
–Danny Heitman, contributing writer for The Advocate