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Organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, this exhibition
travelled to The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Cleveland Museum of Art.
 Faces of Impressionism:
Portraits from American Collections
by Sona Johnston, Susan Bollendorf, John House, Baltimore Museum of Art
The Impressionists redefined the concept of Western portraiture with their iconoclastic approach to art.
By focusing on ephemera, and including the sitter in a larger environment, the Impressionists removed portraiture's previous purpose of formally documenting the subjects' status for the historical record.
With this informal approach to articulating individual identities, the Impressionists captured an intimate side of their sitters, as well as their era.
"Faces of Impressionism" the first show to focus on exclusively on the portraits made by the Impressionists, as well as their immediate predecessors and successors.
Presented chronologically, this survey begins in the mid-nineteenth century with Realist artists, including Courbet and Manet, whose methods and subjects sparked the Impressionists to revolutionize painting.
This volume features the best examples from the artists who came to define the Impressionist movement, including Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Degas, Morisot, and Pissaro, as well as later work by Cezanne and Gauguin, whose artistic advancements prefigure the course of twentieth-century painting.
"Faces of Impressionism" describes the artist's relationship with the sitter, as well as other images (paintings and/or photographs) which situate the work in the history of art. The Impressionistic developments in style and subject reflect the advancements of their society; their art reflects the bourgeois rise to power.
From Mary Cassatt's modernized Madonna and Child to Degas' Manet's, and Gauguin's images of entertainers, once can feel the creeping current of contemporary culture which parallels their more apparent, distinctive approach to painting.
As so many people who were not aristocracy or clergy could commission portraits, slowly but surely, consumerism, as dictated by the middle class, emerged.
(Not ironically, the paintings for "Faces of Impressionism" have been garnered from American collections, as, at that time, those on this side of the Atlantic purchased that which was popular in Europe.)
This volume, revealing an intimate picture of the Impressionist world, provides valuable insight into a movement that changed the course of painting forever.
Card catalog description
"This book accompanies the first major exhibition to focus exclusively on the portraits made by the Impressionist masters and their immediate predecessors.
Breaking free from portraiture's conventions, the Impressionists expanded the notion of a portrait to reflect not only an individual's appearance but also his or her everyday surroundings.
From traditional, tightly rendered likenesses to light-filled, loosely brushed paintings, the works in this volume depict a variety of subjects: friends, family members, patrons, public figures, and the artists themselves.
Reproduced are key works by fourteen pivotal figures including Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, which reveal the astonishing originality and beauty of the Impressionists'
portraits." -- BOOK JACKET.
Baltimore Museum of Art Website 10 Art Museum Drive
Baltimore, MD 21218-3898
The BMA is located on Art Museum Drive at North Charles and 31st Streets (Wyman Park), and is three miles north of Baltimore's Inner Harbor.
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