Paint & Stages
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
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The Florence Griswold Museum, in Old Lyme, Conn., is hosting a most appropriate exhibit this summer: “Impressionist Giverny: American Painters in France, 1885-1915” (now through July 27). In the late 19th century, the home of Miss Florence Griswold was a popular refuge for artists, and that legacy is revived with a painting exhibition that emphasizes the artistic allure of the countryside. On loan from the Chicago-based Terra Foundation for American Art, which runs the Musée d’Art Américain in Giverny, France, the show offers a thorough look at the paintings that came out of a single, well-trafficked belle époque art colony.
The works, which come from an era when daubing at one’s easel in the middle of a French field was considered the height of chic, aren’t all masterpieces. But Giverny did attract at least two important American painters, Theodore Robinson and Frederick Frieseke. And as the Griswold’s head curator, Amy Kurtz Lansing, said, “American artists really developed their own version of Impressionism.”
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