Speed Art Museum’s ‘Impressionist Landscapes: Monet to Sargent’ first marquee show of 2011

Monet's "Rising Tide at Pourville," Brooklyn Museum of Art. (Image courtesy of the Speed Art Museum)

(Editor’s note: This post was updated at 1:45 p.m. on February 7. An earlier version incorrectly identified ownership of Alfred Sisley’s “Hilly Path, Ville d’Avray.”)

It’s February. It’s gray. It’s cold.

No better time to let the Impressionists transport you to the seascapes and fields of France.

Louisville’s first must-see show of 2011 opened this weekend at the Speed Museum – an expansive exhibit that includes not just Impressionist pieces, but examples from the movements that led to Impressionism as well as the schools it inspired.

“Impressionist Landscapes: Monet to Sargent” is exceptional in that paintings from the Brooklyn Museum of Art are augmented by canvasses from the Speed Museum’s permanent collection as well as works loaned by local collectors such as Mary Louise Barr, the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the University of Kentucky, said Ruth Cloudman, Speed Museum chief curator.

(Cloudman and Kirsten Popp, the Speed’s public information associate, gave Insider Louisville a pre-show peek at “Impressionist Landscapes,” which runs through May 22.)

Cloudman and the Speed Museum staff assembled more than 70 works, in part by persuading local collectors and institutions to add their Impressionist pieces to works from the Brooklyn Museum collection in order to create a stellar show.

“I think the whole show hinges on that,” Cloudman said. “I knew what we could do … I knew what we could put together if we could get the loans.”

Though the show may lack seminal works such as Monet’s “Impression: Rising Sun,” the most celebrated French Impressionists are on display including Camille Pissarro and Gustave Courbet, along with American counterparts including Childe Hassam and John Singer Sargent.

It’s all there. You can sense the painters’ intoxication with painting en plein-aire, their liberation from the studios only recently made possible by expanding train networks, as Cloudman pointed out during the walk-through.

While Impressionism abandoned academic painting for looser, kinetic techniques and experimentation, the Impressionists were still obsessed with formal, figurative content and draftsmanship while they rushed to scrape surfaces for texture and pile on paint.

Impressionism was all about recording the moment down to the precise time of day and weather conditions. Impressionists often painted the same scene at different times of the day in different weather through the seasons, Cloudman said.

Some Impressionist works also are time capsules that hint at the encroachment of the industrial age into otherwise bucolic landscapes.

In “River Seine at Mantes,” Daubigny – a painter from the Barbizon school preceding Impressionism – didn’t edit out a smokestack on the left of the frame that depicts a lone female figure communing with nature.

"Hilly Path, Ville d'Avray," (From the permanent collection of the Speed Art Museum)

In Alfred Sisley’s “Hilly Path, Ville d’Avray,” a train is just visible in the right hand corner of the frame, the harbinger of the arrival of the Industrial Age in rural France.

Highlights from the Speed’s collection include:

When I went back to see “Impressionist Landscapes” on opening night, Feb. 4, viewers were collecting around Julien Dupre’s “In the Pasture,” from the collection of The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, where Cloudman said it’s the most popular painting. Okay, it’s kind of corny in the 21st Century – a peasant girl pulling against an obstinate cow. But the sheer scale of the canvas and the photo-realism feel to “In the Pasture” are captivating.

Other “Impressionist Landscapes” highlights include Eugene Boudin’s “The Beach at Trouville,” a bright, sweeping beach snapshot that glows with unfiltered light and the inimitable John Singer Sargent’s “Dolce Far Niente,” a costume romp that’s a virtuoso performance by the infinitely skilled American.

Also, don’t miss Monet’s “The Islets at Port-Villez”, a bolder step toward pure color and abstraction and away from narrative than the more conventional pictures in the show.