Collecting Impressionism: Telfair's Modern Vision

In the 1870s, the art world experienced a revolution. A group of artists known as the Impressionists emerged in Paris, challenging the status quo with their blazingly bright colors, broad brushstrokes, fascination with the effects of sunlight, and insistence that modest landscapes and views of contemporary life were worthy subjects for fine art.

More than 30 years later, in 1906, this revolution reached Savannah when internationally-renowned artist Gari Melchers began advising the Telfair Academy (now Telfair Museums) on its purchases. Telfair opened in 1886 as the first public art museum in the South, and its founding collections belonged to the traditional, European-dominated academic school of art that had governed the art world until the Impressionists burst onto the scene and redefined what it meant to be avant-garde.

Over the course of his involvement with Telfair, from 1906 through the 1920s, Melchers reinvigorated and modernized Telfair’s collection by introducing work by innovative American, French, and (later) German artists who demonstrated the broad-ranging influence of the Impressionists. Artist and art critic William P. Silva had already noticed Melchers’s impact by 1910, writing: “The paintings purchased for the gallery on the advice of Mr. Melchers are representative examples of some of the best-known modern men, American and French.” In 1917, writer Julian Street visited and wrote rapturously about Telfair’s “modern American paintings,” exclaiming: “Away down here in Savannah there is someone buying better paintings for a little museum than the heads of many of the big museums in the country have had sense enough or courage enough to buy.”

Collecting Impressionism: Telfair’s Modern Vision brings together more than 40 works of art, all drawn from Telfair’s collection, to illustrate how Melchers’s vision left an indelible mark on Telfair Museums. Many of these works were collected directly by Melchers himself, while others are later acquisitions inspired by Melchers’s modern vision. Together, they show that Telfair has always engaged with the art of its time, a practice that continues with the modern and contemporary collection highlights on view in the adjacent gallery.

This exhibition is organized by Telfair Museums and curated by Courtney McNeil, Chief Curator & Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs.