(back to top)

(back to top)

Poppies gives the effect of having been painted quickly and directly before the subject.

At a distance, the choppy strokes and daubs of color resolve into a luminous floral landscape.

Painted in France in 1888, this canvas is one of the earliest American responses to French Impressionism.

(back to top)

Robert W. Vonnoh

Poppies, 1888

oil on canvas

13 x 18 in.

James E. Roberts Fund

Robert Vonnoh may not be one of America’s best-known Impressionist painters, but he was the first American artist to bring European Impressionism to this country. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1858, Vonnoh moved with his parents to Boston while still a child. His is best known as a teacher whose students included William Glackens, Robert Henri and John Sloan, who became part of the group known as the Ashcan School. Vonnoh made numerous trips to France, first to study at the Académie Julian and later to settle in the area of Grèz-sur-Loing near the Forest of Fontainebleau. Numerous paintings created in France were displayed at the Paris Salon, but he also had a one-man show in America at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was principal instructor in portrait and landscape painting at the academy from 1891 to 1894. During his career, Vonnoh was considered one of the foremost landscape and portrait painters in America. For 25 years he was part of the artists’ colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut.

During his second stay in France, Vonnoh painted Poppies, which is related to a large canvas of poppy fields in Flanders from the same year. Because of their intense hues, poppy fields were favorite subjects for the French Impressionists. Vonnoh’s painting seems to have been rendered quickly and directly before the subject. With no horizon or path for the eye to follow out of the foreground, the landscape seems to pitch forward, emphasizing the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. At a distance, the swarm of choppy strokes and daubs of vivid pigment resolve into a luminous picture that incorporates the Impressionist techniques of broken brushwork and contrasting complementary colors. Poppies is one of the earliest paintings by an American Impressionist to equal in brilliance of color and freedom of handling the work of the French Impressionists.

Reference

Robert Vonnoh, Mary Brawley Hill. Grez Days: Robert Vonnoh in France. New York: Berry Hill Galleries, 1987. ASIN: B0006ENREQ