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Pennsylvania Impressionism was an American Impressionist movement of the first half of the 20th century that was centered in and around Bucks County, Pennsylvania, particularly the town of New Hope. The movement is sometimes referred to as the "New Hope School" or the "Pennsylvania School" of landscape painting.
Landscape painter William Langson Lathrop (1859–1938) moved to New Hope in 1898, where he founded a summer art school. The mill town was located along the Delaware River, about forty miles from Philadelphia and seventy miles from Manhattan. The area's rolling hills were spectacular, and the river, its tributaries, and the Delaware Canal were picturesque. The natural beauty attracted the artist Edward Redfield (1869–1965), who settled north of the town. Redfield painted nature in bold and vibrant colors, and was a pioneer of the realistic painting of winter in America.
Lathrop's thick layering distinguished him from his contemporaries, and he amassed more honors and awards than any other artist in the New Hope colony. His style is distinguished by its color, light, and usual time of day when painting. The third major artist to settle in the area was Daniel Garber (1880–1958), who came to New Hope in 1907. Garber hated painting winter scenes and applied his paint lightly. He was an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and popularized rain paintings.
As more artists came to the colony, the artists formed art groups with different ideas. The two main groups were the Impressionists and the Modernists. The Pennsylvania Impressionists, a key movement in American Impressionism, influenced major artists such as Walter Schofield (1867–1944), George Sotter (1879–1953) and Henry Snell (1858–1943). William Langson Lathrop purchased the Phillips Mill property to use as a venue to hold galleries and exhibitions. Modernist Lloyd R. Ney submitted a painting of the New Hope canal. Lathrop threatened to reject the painting because the colors were too disturbing. Charles Ramsey, Lloyd Ney's good friend, was disturbed by this comment and formed the “New Group.” This group rebelled against the traditional impressionists, hosting its inaugural show the day before the Phillips Mill Exhibition on May 16, 1930.
Many years later, a flood of artists came to Pennsylvania because of Garber's influence. This group included artists such as Robert A. Darrah Miller (1905–1966), Peter Keenan (1896–1952), Charles Evans (1907–1992), Henry Baker (1900–1957), Richard Wedderspoon (1889–1976), Carl Lindborg (1903–1994), Frederick Harer (1879–1947), Faye Swengel Badura (1904–1991), Louis Stone (1902–1984), and Charles Ward (1900–1962). Other important modernist painters to later settle in the area after the initial arrivals were Josef Zenk (1904–2000), Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt (1878–1955), Swiss–born Joseph Meierhans (1890–1980), Clarence Carter (1904–2000), and Richard Peter Hoffman (1911–1997).
Finally, there were the “Last Ten." These ten women artists consisted of Fern Coppedge (1883–1951) and Mary Elizabeth Price (1877–1965) from New Hope, as well as Nancy Maybin Ferguson (1869–1967), Emma Fordyce MacRae (1887–1974), Eleanor Abrams (1885–1967), Constance Cochrane (1888–1962), and Theresa Bernstein (1890–2002). These women influenced many other women to join the Pennsylvania Impressionism movement.
Similar to the French impressionist movement, Pennsylvania Impressionist art was characterized by an interest in the quality of color, light, and the time of day. This group of artists usually painted en plein air (outdoors) to capture the moment. According to the James A. Michener Art Museum’s senior curator Brian Peterson, “what most characterized Pennsylvania impressionism was not a single, unified style but rather the emergence of many mature, distinctive voices: Daniel Garber's luminous, poetic renditions of the Delaware River; Fern Coppedge's colorful village scenes; Robert Spencer's lyrical views of mills and tenements; John Folinsbee's moody, expressionistic snowscapes; and William L. Lathrop's deeply felt, evocative Bucks County vistas."
Art historian Thomas C. Folk defines the movement as the Late Pennsylvania School, those artists that "came to prominence in Bucks County after 1915 or after the Armory Show and the Panama–Pacific International Exposition." According to Folk, the three most notable artists in this group were John Fulton Folinsbee, Walter Emerson Baum and George Sotter.
One of the artists, Walter Emerson Baum, worked as a teacher and educator and through his founding of the Baum School of Art and the Allentown Art Museum, would serve to expand the influence of the movement out of Bucks County and into Lehigh County, specifically Allentown and the Lehigh Valley, where the movement continued to flourish into the 1940s and 1950s. Today, this group of artists is collectively known as the Baum Circle.
Pennsylvania Impressionist painters include:
New Hope is a borough in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 2,612 at the 2020 census. New Hope is located approximately 30 mi (48 km) north of Philadelphia, and lies on the west bank of the Delaware River at its confluence with Aquetong Creek. New Hope and the surrounding Solebury Township and Upper Makefield Township are part of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The two-lane New Hope–Lambertville Bridge carries automobile and foot traffic across the Delaware to Lambertville, New Jersey, on the east bank.
American Impressionism was a style of painting related to European Impressionism and practiced by American artists in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth. The style is characterized by loose brushwork and vivid colors with a wide array of subject matters but focusing on landscapes and upper-class domestic life.
Mary Elizabeth Price, also known as M. Elizabeth Price, was an American Impressionist painter. She was an early member of the Philadelphia Ten, organizing several of the group's exhibitions. She steadily exhibited her works with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and other organizations over the course of her career. She was one of the several family members who entered the field of art as artists, dealers, or framemakers.
William Langson Lathrop was an American Impressionist landscape painter and founder of the art colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he was an influential founder of Pennsylvania Impressionism.
Edward Willis Redfield was an American Impressionist landscape painter and member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He is best known today for his impressionist scenes of the New Hope area, often depicting the snow-covered countryside. He also spent his summers on Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where he interpreted the local coastline. He frequently painted Maine's Monhegan Island.
Daniel Garber was an American Impressionist landscape painter and member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He is best known today for his large impressionist scenes of the New Hope area, in which he often depicted the Delaware River. He also painted figurative interior works and excelled at etching. In addition to his painting career, Garber taught art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for over forty years.
John Emil Berninger was an American landscape painter and Pennsylvania impressionist. He lived and painted in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Karl Henry Buesgen, Sr. was an American landscape painter and Pennsylvania impressionist typically associated with the Baum Circle, a group of artists either taught by, associated with, or directly influenced by Pennsylvania impressionist painter Walter Emerson Baum.
Walter Emerson Baum was an American artist and educator active in the Bucks and Lehigh County areas of Pennsylvania in the United States. In addition to being a prolific painter, Baum was also responsible for the founding of the Baum School of Art and the Allentown Art Museum.
The Michener Art Museum is a private, non-profit museum that is located in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1988, it was named for the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer James A. Michener, a Doylestown resident.
The Reading Public Museum is a museum in Reading, Pennsylvania located in the 18th Ward, along the Wyomissing Creek. The museum's permanent collection mainly focuses on art, science, and civilization and contains over 280,000 objects. It also has a planetarium and a 25-acre (100,000 m2) arboretum.
John Fulton "Jack" Folinsbee was an American landscape, marine and portrait painter, and a member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He is best known today for his impressionist scenes of New Hope and Lambertville, New Jersey, particularly the factories, quarries, and canals along the Delaware River.
Fern Isabel Coppedge was an American impressionist painter.
Roy Cleveland Nuse (1885–1975) was a Pennsylvania Impressionist artist and a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1925 to 1954. For almost 60 years he lived and painted in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, working in a plein-air, impressionist style. His six children were often the subjects of his paintings, depicted especially in rural, outdoor settings. Working primarily in oils, but also in pastels, Nuse painted landscapes, figures in the landscape, still lifes and portraits.
William Newport Goodell (1908–1999) was an American artist, craftsman, and educator. He was born August 16, 1908, in Germantown, Philadelphia and briefly attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), including its country school in Chester Springs, studying under Pennsylvania impressionist Daniel Garber and noted academician Joseph Thurman Pearson, Jr., before opening his own studio on Germantown Avenue in 1929.
Charles Rosen was an American painter who lived for many years in Woodstock, New York. In the 1910s he was acclaimed for his Impressionist winter landscapes. He became dissatisfied with this style and around 1920 he changed to a radically different cubist-realist (Precisionism) style. He became recognized as one of the leaders of the Woodstock artists colony.
Rae Sloan Bredin was an American painter. He was a member of the New Hope, Pennsylvania school of impressionists. He is known for his peaceful spring and summer landscapes with relaxed groups of women and children.
Morgan Colt was an American metalworker, furniture craftsman, impressionist painter, and architect. He helped found the New Hope, Bucks County, Pennsylvania colony of painters—the leading landscape school in the United States during the early 20th–century—but was better known as a craftsman than a painter, specializing in hand–wrought iron garden furniture and fire screens. Many of his paintings were accidentally destroyed after his death.
Robert Carpenter Spencer was an American painter who received extensive recognition in his day. He was one of the Pennsylvania impressionists, but is better known for his paintings of the mills and working people of the Delaware River region than for landscapes. His work is held in numerous public collections.
Walter Elmer Schofield was an American Impressionist landscape and marine painter. Although he never lived in New Hope or Bucks County, Schofield is regarded as one of the Pennsylvania Impressionists.
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