Audio Introduction to 'Americans in Paris 1860-1900'

Part 1: The Lure of Paris Transcript

Narrator:

The years 1860 to 1900 marked an exceptional time in the history of American art. It was an era when American artists looked almost exclusively to one city - Paris - for their inspiration. At the National Gallery London a major exhibition, sponsored by Rothschild, celebrates this period. Called Americans in Paris it gathers wonderful paintings by Whistler, Sargent, Cassatt and their contemporaries. This downloadable companion guide takes a closer look at some of the themes and ideas raised by this fascinating show.

American artists had lived and worked in Paris before the 1860s, but it wasn't really until 1865 with the end of the Civil War in America that their intense passion for the city began. Peace brought a massive resurgence of interest in the arts. And while attendance at American art schools was booming, anyone serious about a career in painting was looking across the Atlantic.

Paris was the undisputed world capital of the arts. It was the best place for artists to train, the best place to study at museums and also the best place to acquire that polish and sophistication so valued by collectors. Fortunately there were plenty of places for American students to go. A few managed to get into the State run 'Ecole des Beaux Arts' - the School of Fine Arts. This offered a highly traditional, academic training that relied mostly on drawing and careful study of antique art and the Old Masters. But competition for places was fierce and applicants had to speak French. For everyone else there were the independently run studios where students could choose between traditional styles of teaching or the more progressive approach where, for a fee, they could turn up, work from a live model and receive criticism from the studio master. One of the most famous of these studios was the Académie Julian - a great favourite among Americans - which in 1885 had no less than 400 students. 'Never had I heard or seen such bedlam,' one American wrote of one of the tiny, dilapidated studios crammed with artists. 'Fifty or sixty men smoking in such a room for two or three hours would make it so that those on the back rows could hardly see the model.'

By the 1880s, as many as a thousand Americans were arriving in Paris every year. And the first room of the National Gallery exhibition is filled with portraits showing them. Despite the hardships - the cramped studios and often poor lodgings - the preening young men in these pictures reveal how enthusiastically Americans threw themselves into Parisian life, adopting the self-conscious, dandified pose of the 'flâneur', the princely observer of the urban scene. But there's one picture that illustrates an important aspect of the story of Americans in Paris. It's a self-portrait by a woman artist Ellen Day Hale. One of the curators of the exhibition, Erica Hirshler from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, describes it:

Erica Hirshler:

One of the things I find so striking about this portrait is the way she is staring right at you and not being modest at all in a typically feminine way. She is as forthright as any of the men in the room.

Narrator:

You may be surprised to learn that women artists like Hale made up as much as a third of the American students who came to Paris - and this in spite of the difficulties many of them faced. Their families often disapproved and worried. Hale's mother, for example, sent her off saying: 'Don't go off exploring on your own, you will never be taken for an old married woman by those vicious Frenchmen!' Living and working as unchaperoned women also caused problems, and when it came to training further obstacles lay in their path. The 'Ecole des Beaux Arts' still refused entry to women and so too, officially, did any studio where men were drawing from nude models. One enterprising painter, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, whose work appears in the exhibition, got round the rules by obtaining a licence from the authorities to wear male clothing so she could attend a men-only life-drawing class. But for those who preferred not to cross-dress, they could, for double the usual fee, attend one of a number of independently run women-only studios that flourished from the 1880s onwards.

Yet in spite of all the drawbacks, Paris offered American women artists enormous freedom. They no longer had to conform to American rules restricting female behaviour. And because they were foreigners, they didn't feel compelled to conform to the French rules either.

Erica Hirshler:

I think the Americans stood apart because of their independence and their taking of liberties that perhaps were unusual for a European audience. There was a very distinctive American type that is recorded ... particularly in the novels of Henry James where women go off and do things and often run against Europeans mores ... in a way that isn't entirely in their favour. But this idea of the free, healthy, outgoing American was very much a type at the end of the 19th century.

Narrator:

And it wasn't just American women who could enjoy freedoms they'd been denied at home. One featured painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, was an African American. And as another of the exhibition's curators, Kathleen Adler of the National Gallery explains, while Tanner was the victim of racial segregation back in the States, in Paris it was a different story:

Kathleen Adler:

Strangely enough, he didn't encounter prejudice from exactly the same American fellow students whom he'd studied with in Philadelphia. When he met them in Paris it suddenly seemed as if the race issue was no longer applicable.

Narrator:

It was little wonder that some American artists, Tanner among them, never returned home.

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