A landmark retrospective that examines William Merritt Chase and his lasting contribution to the history of modern art The history of modern art owes a great debt to William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), one of America's influential artists and educators. Chase was a leading member of the international artistic avant-garde and was best known for his mastery of a wide range of subjects in oil and pastel, including figures, landscapes, urban park scenes, interiors, and portraits. As a teacher and founder of the Shinnecock Summer School of Art and the New York School of Art, Chase mentored a new generation of modernists, including Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Joseph Stella. A century after his death, the breadth and richness of Chase's career are celebrated in this beautifully illustrated publication. Five essays by prominent scholars of American art offer new insights into Chase's multi-faceted artistic practice and his position in the international cultural climate at the turn of the 20th century. Published in association with The Phillips Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (06/04/16-09/11/16) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (10/09/16-01/16/17) Ca'Pesaro-Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna, Venice (02/11/17-05/28/17)

Sargent and Fashion explores the dynamic relationship of painting and dress — from portraits and performance, gender expression and the New Woman, to the pull of tradition and the excitement of new ideas. "The coat is the picture," John Singer Sargent exclaimed to his fellow artist Graham Robertson in the summer of 1894, tugging a heavy overcoat ever more tightly around his sitter's slender figure. Sought-after by sitters for his ability to present to the world flattering and engaging likenesses, Sargent was simultaneously pursuing his own artistic vision. Rather than holding up a mirror to contemporary fashion, Sargent made fashion a part of his artistic repertoire. He often chose what his sitters wore, pinned their garments, or draped fabric around them, all with a view to creating confections to be recorded on canvas through his unrivalled artistic gifts. With contributions from many of the leading thinkers on Sargent and his world, and lavish reproductions of major portraits and exquisite costumes of the period, this publication offers a vital new perspective on one of the most famous and fashionable artists of all time.

John Leslie Breck (1860-1899) was one of the founders of the American art colony at Giverny and was among the earliest American artists to embrace the Impressionist style. He was also one of the first to exhibit his Impressionist paintings in America and helped to popularize the style during his years working in the Boston area in the 1890s. Between 1887 and 1888 he and a handful of his American colleagues began visiting the French village of Giverny, where they met Claude Monet and subsequently explored the new approach to painting that Monet had helped to pioneer. Breck's canvases from this period, loosely brushed and filled with light and color, are a marked departure from his earlier works that are characterized by darker tonalities and tighter brushwork that typified the preferred style of the era. When Breck returned to America in 1892, he applied what he had learned to paintings of the New England landscape and frequently exhibited his work. Inspired by The Mint Museum's 2016 acquisition of John Leslie Breck's canvas Suzanne Hoschede-Monet Sewing, this volume includes approximately 70 of Breck's finest works, drawn from public and private collections. Along with his scenes of Giverny and America, this volume features a selection of paintings from his sojourn in Venice in 1897. Always interested exploring in new ways of seeing the world, Breck had begun to explore aspects of post-Impressionism and Asian aesthetics in the years before his early death, at the age of 39, in 1899. This volume also features up to 36 additional comparative images, including details, photographs, and paintings by Monet and other leading American impressionists including Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, Lila Cabot Perry, Childe Hassam, and Arthur Wesley Dow, presented throughout the main essays and chronology and appendices.

A celebration of the American painter's life and work in the region he loved best In 1883 American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) moved his studio from New York City to Prouts Neck, a slip of coastline just south of Portland, Maine. Here, over the course of twenty-five years, Homer produced his most celebrated and emotionally powerful paintings, which often depicted the dramatic views and storm-strewn skies around his home. Homer's influence and the Prouts Neck area would have a profound effect on the rise of a new American modernism, inspiring the artists who followed him. This beautifully illustrated catalogue celebrates Homer's legacy at Prouts Neck, and documents the Portland Museum of Art's six-year conservation project to preserve the Winslow Homer Studio, the former carriage house in which Homer lived and worked. Photographs of the studio and site, never before open to the public, highlight views that are recognizable as the subject of so many of Homer's paintings. Essays by leading scholars examine his iconic masterpieces; his artistic development in Prouts Neck; the architecture of his studio; his relationship to French painting; and the full range of his marine paintings. Published in association with the Portland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Portland Museum of Art(09/22/12-12/30/12)

John Singer Sargent's approach to watercolor was unconventional. Going beyond turn-of-the-century standards for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes, his confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. One reviewer of an exhibition in London proclaimed him "an eagle in a dove-cote"; another called his work "swagger" watercolors. For Sargent, however, the watercolors were not so much about swagger as about a renewed and liberated approach to painting. In watercolor, his vision became more personal and his works more interconnected, as he considered the way one image--often of a friend or favorite place--enhanced another. Sargent held only two major watercolor exhibitions in the United States during his lifetime. The contents of the first, in 1909, were purchased in their entirety by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The paintings exhibited in the other, in 1912, were scooped up by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "John Singer Sargent Watercolors" reunites nearly 100 works from these collections for the first time, arranging them by themes and subjects: sunlight on stone, figures reclining on grass, patterns of light and shadow. Enhanced by biographical and technical essays, and lavishly illustrated with 175 color reproductions, this publication introduces readers to the full sweep of Sargent's accomplishments in this medium, in works that delight the eye as well as challenge our understanding of this prodigiously gifted artist.
The international art star of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was born in Italy to American parents, trained in Paris and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. Sargent is best known for his dramatic and stylish portraits, but he was equally active as a landscapist, muralist, and watercolor painter. His dynamic and boldly conceived watercolors, created during travels to Tuscan gardens, Alpine retreats, Venetian canals and Bedouin encampments, record unusual motifs that caught his incisive eye.