May 31, 2025–April 5, 2026

See approximately 40 Impressionist works from Europe and the United States alike, drawn from the Museum’s rich holdings in this area as well as significant loans. Few artistic movements have captivated the imagination more enduringly than Impressionism, originally a term of derision implying slap-dash facture. The now-beloved bold, bright colors thickly applied with a seemingly spontaneous and immediately visible touch of the artist’s brush were the hallmarks of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot. Their paintings caused a stir in the first “Impressionist” exhibition of 1874 in Paris, France, held parallel to the state-funded Salon de Paris of academic artists.

The first American artists to champion Impressionism, such as Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent, did so in no small part by reviving the painterly brush stroke, a pronounced shift from the glossy finish of paint surfaces seen in European academic painting or American Romantic landscape. The sunny American West also provided an ideal setting for painting out of doors and the artists who espoused the plein-air approach would soon inspire generations of followers.

The works in this exhibition tell the story of the enduring rise of Impressionism from Monet to Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard, to Americans such as William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Childe Hassam.

Featured at top right: Claude Monet, Haystacks at Chailly (detail), 1865. Oil on canvas. Museum purchase, 1982.20.