Collecting Impressionism: Telfair's Modern Vision
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.
American Impressionism
From its origins in Paris in the 1870s, Impressionism made its way to the United States due in large part to the American artists who flocked to Europe, studying at one of the many schools that welcomed American students. One of the most popular of these schools was the Académie Julian in Paris, where more than half of the Americans featured in this gallery studied at some point.
The American Impressionists embraced many of the qualities that distinguished this style of painting, including a desire to record fleeting effects of sunlight and atmosphere, the use of bright areas of unblended color, thickly-applied paint, and the selection of simple landscapes and scenes of everyday life rather than narrative history paintings. Some scholars argue that American Impressionists were less likely than their French counterparts to fully abandon their academic training, creating paintings with less fluid compositions.
The inclusion of American artists of any kind in Telfair’s collection is a result of the influence of art advisor Gari Melchers. Although his predecessor at the museum had collected almost exclusively work by European artists, Melchers deliberately divided his acquisitions between European artists and their American counterparts, explaining, “You see my ardent desire is to work in an American picture as often as possible.” Melchers was true to his word, purchasing important paintings by American artists Childe Hassam (acquired in 1907), Ernest Lawson (1907), George Hitchcock (1908), Frederick Carl Frieseke (1910), Charles Webster Hawthorne (1921), Willard Metcalf (1926), and others.
French Impressionism
Although the only French artist on view in this exhibition to have exhibited with the original French Impressionists is Jean-François Raffaëlli, all were impacted in some way by the rise of the Impressionist style of painting in the late 19th century. Each of the works in this section was purchased for Telfair’s collection by art advisor Gari Melchers. Perhaps cognizant of the fact that Savannah would not have provided a warm reception to the most radical of the modern French artists, Melchers moderated his selection by purchasing works that were decisively modern in style but that stopped short of being truly radical. As a result, while the quality of these paintings is very high, their creators are not as well known today as they were during their lifetimes.
The purchase of each of these paintings was carefully negotiated between Melchers, acting as agent for Telfair, and the artist or the artist’s representatives. Melchers used his own status as an artist and his passion for developing Telfair’s collection to bolster his negotiations. In the case of Henri Caro-Delvaille, Melchers recounted to Telfair’s board president: “He just simply did not want to part with it, and only today at a luncheon party did he give in. I told him that the Savannah museum was the most promising in our glorious country, as in the last few years they had acquired a Roll, Puvis de Chavannes, La Touche, Aman-Jean, several Besnards, Raffaëllis and that sort of thing, all of which you know is true.”
German Impressionism
Despite (or perhaps because of) its popularity in Paris, Impressionism took nearly two decades to receive widespread acceptance in Germany. Tensions between Germany and France following the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) led to reduced contact between the two nations and a consequent reduction in the interchange of artistic ideas. Even after the Impressionist style of painting became popular among German artists, these artists contended with public disapproval from Kaiser Wilhelm II. Stylistically, the German Impressionists are known for their use of a darker, more somber color palette than their French counterparts.
The works in this section, all created by artists from or active in Germany, reflect the background and interests of Gari Melchers, the art advisor who acquired them for Telfair’s collection. Melchers had strong ties to Germany; his father was born there, and Melchers received some of his earliest artistic training in Dusseldorf. All acquired between 1907 and 1916, several of the paintings in this section portray Dutch subjects, perhaps a nod to the fact that Melchers was primarily living and working in the Netherlands during this period.