John Henry Twachtman was one of the foremost American Impressionist painters of his era. A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Twachtman trained in Munich and Paris. He looked towards Europe throughout his early career, a period when he regularly traveled abroad. Following his final return from Europe in 1886, he remained in the United States, painting American landscapes and domestic scenes in a style influenced both by international artistic developments and a strong American identity.
Henry Fuller came from an artistic family, and he studied with the painters Dennis Bunker, William Merritt Chase, and Kenyon Cox. The most productive years of his career were spent at the artists' colony of Cornish, New Hampshire, a community where artists balanced their work in the studio with theatricals, poetry, and gardening. Fuller's work is not especially well known, nor do many examples exist—he was not a leader of the Cornish colony, but he admirably embodied its ideals and concerns.
William Merritt Chase was a portrait painter at the forefront of fashion, catering to upper-class tastes in New York. Despite his well-known bohemianism, Chase exemplified a conservative style. When painting portraits, Chase often employed the dark palette he learned at the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany. When painting landscapes, however, Chase called upon the bright and colorful impressionist style pioneered earlier by Claude Monet and other French artists, moving between techniques at will.
Childe Hassam grew up just outside of Boston as the son of a hardware merchant. After apprenticing to a wood engraver, he found work as an illustrator for Boston periodicals. Hassam took art classes at night and traveled to Paris in 1886 to study at the Académie Julian, where he encountered the latest developments in Impressionism, the style he would practice after his return to America in 1889. By the turn of the century, he was one of the leading impressionist painters in the United States.
George Hitchcock grew up in Rhode Island, attended Brown University, and studied law at Harvard. Just a few short years after being admitted to the bar in Providence and New York, he abandoned law for art, going abroad to study with renowned teachers, like Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre in Paris and Hendrik Willem Mesdag in the Hague. By 1883, Hitchcock had settled in Holland, making his home near the small village of Egmond aan Zee, which he helped to transform into a significant art colony.
Ernest Lawson trained in the tradition of French Impressionism, studying the changing effects of light and atmosphere and painting with broken strokes of variegated color. Lawson's paintings incorporated a heavy impasto and decorative surface patterning, and in 1893, he left for France to study Impressionism at its source. Returning to the United States, Lawson sought to apply his training to the modern landscape to New York City, repeatedly painting urban settings with an Impressionist brush.
Born in Newfoundland, Maurice Prendergast came to America with his family at the age of ten. After living in Boston for some time, he left America to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. In Europe, Prendergast was exposed to the myriad art movements and styles of the beginning of the twentieth century, though he was most influenced by the post-Impressionist style. Returning to America, Prendergast settled in New York City, where he perfected his production of kaleidoscopic images of city life.
An athlete as well as an artist at the University of Ohio, Bellows arrived in New York to study with Robert Henri in 1904. Henri urged his students to paint expressively and to seek subjects in daily life. Bellows responded to these lessons with vigor, becoming Henri's disciple and lifelong friend. A talented printmaker, Bellows contributed illustrations to the Socialist periodical “The Masses,” even while his career blossomed with his election to the conservative National Academy of Design.
Robert Henri began his career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied a curriculum designed by Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anshutz. From these artists he inherited a willingness to engage directly with the unique qualities and imperfections of his subjects. After a trip to Paris, Henri began to incorporate the visual effects of Impressionism into his images, which resulted in a highly original style of painting that represented the modern world with truth and vitality.
William Glackens established his artistic reputation at the turn of the century with uncompromising modern depictions of urban life. He was born and raised in Philadelphia, where he took night classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts while working as an artist-reporter for a local newspaper. He later moved to New York City, where he became one of the nation's premier commercial illustrators, a profession that provided him the stable income that enabled him to pursue painting.