American Impressionism: What is It? By Dr. Rachel Boate
Sunday Lecture Series 2022 (Virtual Event)
March 20, 2-4pm PDT
This lecture traces the inception and development of American Impressionism in the late 1800s — from the first exhibition of Impressionist art organized in 1883 by Paul Durand-Ruel in Boston to the founding of intimate artists’ colonies along the Eastern seaboard by the turn of the century. Like their French counterparts, the American Impressionists not only experimented with a contemporary visual vocabulary to capture the fleeting scenes of everyday life in a modernizing cultural landscape, but they sought to depict a new national identity. The works of lesser-known figures will be examined alongside landmark paintings by American expatriate artists John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler.
General $30 | Members and Students $25
Get the series of 4 lectures: $90 General Admission; $75 Gallery Members and Students (buy series tickets by March 4).
Images (L-R): James McNeill, Whistler, Cremorne Gardens, No. 2, ca. 1870-1880. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rachel Boate. John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X, 1884, Oil on canvas, Coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dr. Rachel Boate, Visiting Assistant Professor in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, obtained her Ph.D. in 2020 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she specialized in global modern and contemporary art and visual culture with a focus on interwar France and the Americas; cross-cultural histories and theories of abstraction; art and national identity; and intersections between art, political currents, and mass culture. She has been a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and has held visiting fellowships at the Institut Remarque at École Normale supérieure and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, both in Paris. Her publications include chapters in Realism(s) of the Avant-Garde and Modernism (de Gruyter 2020) and France and the Visual Arts Since 1945: Remapping Postwar and Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury 2018).
