Impressionism's Journey: From the Villages of Rural France to the Shores of America

Born in Atlanta in 1929 and raised in Tampa as the only child of a citrus-paper manufacturer, Joannie, as she was known, moved to Jacksonville in 1950 after marrying Martin Stein. Together the couple built Regency Centers into one of the country's leading shopping-center developers, with Joannie serving as a trusted sounding board on design and, later, as chair when the company went public in 1993. Her eye for architecture and instinct for people carried over naturally into art collecting, a passion she pursued for decades and later shared with her second husband, Russell Newton, alongside their travels between Jacksonville, London, and North Carolina. She died in March 2026 at the age of 97, leaving behind a collection that reflects a lifetime of discerning taste––one that finds its fullest expression in the paintings themselves.

Gustave Loiseau's quiet Street Scene, its rooftops catching the rose-gold light of a passing storm, exemplifies the broken, textured brushwork he inherited from Pissarro and Monet. Likewise, Henri Martin's Femme dissolves into a shimmer of Pointillist color, sunlight fracturing across her dress and the flowering hedge behind her. Frederick Carl Frieseke, an American painter who made his home among the gardens of Giverny, brings that same light indoors; a woman in lavender and pink arranges stock and larkspur before a sunlit dresser, a hallmark of his intimate interiors.

Childe Hassam and Dame Laura Knight round out the collection's transatlantic reach, and are no less commanding. Hassam's Cloud Study–a towering cumulus bank pierced by a faint rainbow over open farmland—shows the artist at his most atmospheric, translating Impressionist observation into a distinctly American landscape idiom. The British painter Knight contributes a scene of harborside bathers, painted with the bracing immediacy of plein air observation and capturing childhood summers with warmth and wonder.

Together with important works by Robert Vonnoh, Henri Lebasque, and William Glackens, the collection offers a cohesive survey of a pivotal era, illuminating a shared visual language passed between continents: the fractured brushwork and devotion to natural light that Loiseau and Martin refined in the French countryside reappears, transformed, in Hassam's American skies and Glackens's tender interior. Viewed together, the paintings argue for Impressionism as a living, evolving conversation rather than something monolithic or immutable.

Beginning in West Palm Beach and traveling to Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, a series of regional highlights exhibitions introduces collectors to the collection's finest works ahead of two marquee auctions. The paintings by Loiseau, Knight, and Martin will anchor Freeman's Impressionist & Modern Art auction in New York on October 27, while Hassam and Glackens will take their place in the American Art & Pennsylvania Impressionists sale in Philadelphia on December 8. These sales mark a fitting final chapter to a story decades in the making.