Impressionists beyond France attract attention in movement’s 150th anniversary year

The first generation of French Impressionists — innovative, challenging orthodoxies — ignited latent frustrations in artists of other lands, who took their examples home, creating a blaze of Impressionisms. These offshoots may not fetch the high prices of the founding masters, but they each reflect facets of their inspiration: painting en plein air, using square brushes, a fascination with light, an attraction to incidental scenes of contemporary life. Many of the British Impressionists will be represented at London Art Week (LAW) and Treasure House Fair next week, 150 years after the movement’s founding.

Karen Taylor of Karen Taylor Fine Art, a specialist in British women artists, says: “Many late-19th-century women artists were forging their own paths, but once you have people going to Paris, you can’t escape the Impressionist influence.” During LAW she will show, among works on paper from 1750 to 1950, a watercolour “View of Heidelberg, Germany” (1869), suffused with light, by Sarah Sophia Beale. In 1872, Beale took classes in Paris at Charles Joshua Chaplin’s studio (where American Impressionist Mary Cassatt studied); back in England she set up an art school spreading these modern French ideas.

You did not need to study in Paris, however, to be influenced by the new aesthetic, as feathery, intimate watercolours of mother and child (1899), probably self-portraits, by Mary Gow demonstrate. Supported by her artistic family, Gow studied at Heatherley’s in London, the first British art school to admit women to the life room in the same way as men. These images reflect the focus on female experience pioneered by Cassatt and fellow Impressionist Berthe Morisot. 

Ben Elwes Fine Art will show epic Arctic landscapes painted in situ by Swedish artist Anna Boberg. Mostly self-taught, she saw herself as an expressionist rather than an Impressionist, but her style varied in response to her subject, by turns bold and vigorous, delicate and sensitive, in pursuit of colour and atmosphere. Gallery co-founder Rachel Layton Elwes hopes the exhibition Painting the Arctic Summer will bring new attention to her passionate evocations of the Nordic environment.

Alongside works by Degas and Renoir, Haynes Fine Art will exhibit paintings by the Belgian Fernand Toussaint, who painted in both Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles. Tony Haynes says Toussaint “encompassed subjects from lovely figurative works to still life and landscapes”.

Haynes has made a speciality of the British Impressionists of the Staithes, Newlyn and St Ives schools, some of whom he is also showing. “These UK artists were encouraged to go out to Paris, sit in the cafés, attend the schools,” he says. Some went to Pont-Aven in Brittany, where Gauguin held court. Once back, they sought out atmospheric locations on the Yorkshire and Cornish coasts. Rather than revolutionaries, they felt themselves, in the words of leading figure Stanhope Forbes, as part of “one of the distinct waves of feeling which occasionally occur in Art”. They are not especially expensive either, says Haynes: “Our exhibition is about showing accessible Impressionists.”

Haynes particulary admires the vivid paintings of London- and Paris-trained Dorothea Sharp, which catch the ever-changing bright light of Cornwall’s coast: “Painting through two world wars, a terrible time to be anywhere, she offered happy subjects.” Highly regarded in her lifetime, today her work can be acquired from £12,000.

As part of LAW, David Messum Fine Art celebrates 50 years of showing British Impressionists. In 1985 the gallery published the first comprehensive survey of British Impresssionism, subtitled “A Garden of Bright Images”. It was an effort to draw attention to an area of British painting then often overlooked in favour of the Post-Impressionist-influenced Modernists, such as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Ben Nicholson. Messum suggests that “there was Impressionism in England before French Impressionism — Constable, Gainsborough, Turner. Influence went both ways.”

The gallery championed the Scottish Colourists — Samuel John Peploe, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, GL Hunter and John Duncan Fergusson — who trained in France and closely followed artistic developments there. “Their market has benefited hugely from our attention — and we found a market for Swedish Impressionism also,” Messum says.

This year, the Newlyn school is Messum’s primary focus, including newly acquired pictures of local subjects with fresh brushwork and bright colours by Harold Harvey, who had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, and Gertrude Harvey, his wife.

At the Treasure House Fair, Macconnal-Mason will show work by Harold Harvey (around £150,000), as well as a French view by anglophile Lucien Pissarro (“who we think of as British”). It will offer “Sunset on The Thames” (1917), painted from the Embankment by the Belgian painter Emile Claus, who was much influenced by Monet and spent the years of the first world war in London. David Mason says: “We especially like his London views, but also his landscapes, which border on social realism.”

A proponent of the Belgian variant of Impressionism, known as luminism, Claus will have a pastel on show at the fair with Leighton Fine Art. Nick Leighton suggests that “the market for these lesser-known names is the most interesting one. They are still very accessible.”

This summer presents a good chance for these British Impressionists to have, at last, their own qualities reassessed. Given the variety of different schools, the best of them surely deserve, 150 years on, to shelve their identities as also-rans or Impressionists-lite and be recognised in their own right.