Impressionist Show Coming to Muscarelle in October

By Amber Lester Kennedy Saturday, September 17, 2011

"Autumn on the Seine" by Claude Monet will be one of 50 paintings on display at the Muscarelle from Oct. 22 to Jan. 22, 2012.

“Houses of Parliament in the Fog” will be among 50 paintings, drawings and prints on display in “Seeing Colors: Secrets of the Impressionists,” an exhibition organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art that will make its only mid-Atlantic stop in Williamsburg. The painting is one of a series completed by Monet between 1900 and 1904 that explored difference in the light at different hours and in a range of weather conditions.

Famous artists Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent will be represented in the show, which will explore the emergence of Impressionism in 1870s France, its evolution into Post-Impressionism and the later influence on American artists. “Seeing Colors” will be on view at the Muscarelle from Oct. 22 to Jan. 22, 2012.

Impressionism was marked by increasingly loose brushwork and color experimentation. In its infancy, the movement was unpopular with viewers, but its influence spread into the 1880s, when artists began an even more radical departure from traditional painting techniques.

The exhibit will begin with works by pre-Impressionist artists, such as Eugene Boudin, to mark the initial transition from the academic paintings of the Paris Salon to the airy landscapes that followed. Paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissaro and Frederic Bazille will be shown to illustrate the new school of painting that followed.

Post-Impressionists ventured further into abstraction, and will be represented with works by Paul Cezanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. American artists, including Sargent and Cassatt, will be included in the exhibit, to show how the movement grew in popularity across the Atlantic.

The Muscarelle Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The museum is closed on Mondays. Admission to the exhibit will be $15, but free for museum members, the faculty, staff and students of William & Mary and children under 12. For more information, click here or call 757-221-2700.