United States

Fuller was involved with the artists’ colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, a special atmosphere where artists worked together against a backdrop of theater, poetry, and gardening. This portrait shows Ebba Bohm, a Swedish model who lived with the Fuller family in Cornish, as she contemplates a vase of irises, lost in an idealized world of the artist’s making. Her kimono and the vase of flowers allude to Asian aesthetics, which influenced many American painters at the time.

This painting is one of two works on the same panel—the reverse side features a cityscape. The use of both sides of the panel is evidence of Zorach’s poverty and the scarcity of art materials he had access to during this period. Painted on the bottom of an old drawer, this Madonna holds a stylized lily up toward a light, perhaps from the sun or moon. The spire of the church behind her may have been based on Provincetown’s picturesque Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, which was built in 1847.

The subject of this painting has been identified as a girl from Brittany, France’s northwestern-most region. Beaux spent the summer of 1888 at the artists’ colony of Concarneau in Brittany, where she was intrigued by her encounters with local people, later writing about their customs, clothing, and appearance. Breton peasant subjects were common among American artists, and Beaux gifted this portrait to her friend Anne D. Blake, a Boston-born painter who later became Beaux’s travel companion.

In this untitled landscape of 1922, Obata demonstrated the combined influences of impressionistic Japanese morotai painting and American Impressionism and Tonalism. Here, aqueous washes of black sumi ink poetically evoke, rather than topographically depict, the ethereal landscape of coastal California. This stylistic unification of East and West reflects Obata’s commitment to a global view of art, which he celebrated by cofounding the East West Art Society in 1921.

Hill often painted vast landscapes, with expansive vistas and figures dwarfed by the scenery. The view here has been identified as the San Pedro Creek valley—we, the viewers, are standing on the western side of the mid-Peninsula ridge, looking out toward the Pacific Ocean in late spring or early summer. Trees and scrub open up towards a bridle path crossing the scene, framed by the trees at left and the outcropping of rocks on the right.

This painting shows a young Bacchus-like figure hand-pressing grapes to make wine. This celebration of winemaking can be read as a symbol of California’s agricultural heritage. It perhaps also refers to the resurgence of California’s vineyards following the disastrous phylloxera aphid epidemic of the 1870s and 1880s, which affected the wine industry in Europe and the United States. The artist’s agricultural theme is complemented by the frame motif, which features California poppies.

Glackens often found his subjects near the sea. In this vivid painting of rocks and a distant lighthouse, he portrayed the rocks and ocean like living organisms. The artist’s brushstrokes show the sky as a series of individual gusts of breeze. The water sparkles with colored reflections, and the rough rocks are made to feel heavy by the darkened shadows beneath them. Each object depicted features a rainbow of color, making all elements of this seascape feel intimately intertwined.

Henri’s studies of New York sometimes feel quiet and distant. An influential teacher, he distilled some of his ideas about landscape in his important book, The Art Spirit (1923): “the various details in a landscape painting mean nothing to us if they do not express some mood of nature as felt by the artist. It isn’t sufficient that the spacing and arrangement of the composition be correct in formula. The true artist, in viewing the landscape, renders it upon his canvas as a living thing.”

Inspired by the Celtic Revival movement, which embraced Irish history, mythology, and folklore, this painting would have resonated with Americans of Irish heritage, including the artist. The subject’s flowing auburn hair and low-cut buckskin dress—combined with her role as a hunter, traditionally a male occupation—reflects the period’s fascination with women, preferably from the past, who challenged traditional gender roles.

Inspired by the Celtic Revival movement, which embraced Irish history, mythology, and folklore, this painting would have resonated with Americans of Irish heritage, including the artist. The subject’s flowing auburn hair and low-cut buckskin dress—combined with her role as a hunter, traditionally a male occupation—reflects the period’s fascination with women, preferably from the past, who challenged traditional gender roles.