American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Collection of Charles and Virginia Bowden

Note

Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1858, Robert Vonnoh studied at the Massachusetts Normal Art School and, thereafter, at Paris’s Académie Julian. An accomplished painter and teacher, Vonnoh was vital in introducing European Impressionism to American audiences and art students, both at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His rich legacy as an educator—his pupils included Robert Henri, William Glackens, and Maxfield Parrish, as well as Pennsylvania Impressionists, Edward Redfield and Walter Elmer Schofield—is surpassed only by the quality of his own work. A well-awarded and widely-exhibited artist, Vonnoh’s portraits, landscapes, and experiments in color align him with the greatest painters of his generation.

Enamored with the European Impressionist paintings he encountered in the mid-1880s—at the so-called “Foreign Exhibition” (1883) in Boston and, later, at an American Art Association-organized show in New York City (1886)—Vonnoh and his first wife, Grace D. Farrell, departed for Grez-sur-Loing, an artists’ colony on the outskirts of France’s Fontainebleau Forest. It was during this period, 1887-1890, that he would produce among his most compelling works. Studies and full-fledged landscapes demonstrate the artist’s mastery of Impressionist principles: unblended brushwork, heightened color, generous impasto, and careful attention to both light and atmosphere. Poppies (1888, Indianapolis Museum of Art), a vigorous, mosaic-like view of a Grez-area poppy field, is a testament to Vonnoh’s penchant for formal experimentation, and a turning point in his style.

Flowering Apple Tree, the present lot, is no less impressive. Likely painted outdoors, en plein air, Vonnoh trains his eye on an apple tree in bloom. Staccato brushwork, a textured surface, and brilliant juxtapositions of green, white, lavender, and purple recommend the scene. A subtle manipulation of value creates an impression of long shadows—first and foremost, from the fence and titular tree. On the horizon, at some distance, are the roofs and chimneys of adjacent homes—a recurring detail in Vonnoh’s Grez-era images. An 18 x 15-inch oil on canvas, Flowering Apple Tree was likely executed in the spring of 1888. Here, the lightness and brightness of the season take center stage. The freshness of the scene and the delicacy of Vonnoh’s touch complement what is, for all intents and purposes, one of his strongest “portraits”—another genre in which he distinguished himself.

Vonnoh’s technique and sensitivity to the effects of sun and season recall the work of Claude Monet, the artist’s lifelong inspiration. Vonnoh would have witnessed Monet’s paintings firsthand in Boston and New York—indeed, a pair of the latter’s poppy fields was featured in the American Art Association exhibition of 1886—to say nothing of the reputation Monet enjoyed among American expatriates. His colorful landscapes, and haystacks in particular, were a direct influence on Vonnoh, who folded them into his own repertoire in the 1890s and early 1900s. But whereas Monet and others embraced a near-total dissolution of form, Vonnoh stopped short. Like French Impressionism, Flowering Apple Tree boasts a lyrical, almost poetic quality—an interplay of light, color and shadow—yet it retains a coherent pictorial structure typical of American Impressionism. A tour de force of Vonnoh’s mature work, the painting commingles the best of the two styles.