“John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist” Opening Program at the Figge Art Museum -- June 2.

Thursday, June 2, 6:30 p.m.

Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA

At Davenport's Figge Art Museum on June 2, the Mint Museum's Senior Curator of American Art will discuss a gifted painter credited for introducing Impressionism to the United States during the opening program for the exhibit John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist, with Dr. Jonathan Stuhlman exploring Breck’s work within the context of both European and American Impressionism.

Breck was born at sea off Hong Kong in 1860, and after training in the United States, Germany, and France, he visited the French town of Giverny for the first time in 1887 with a small group of colleagues. He soon befriended Claude Monet and his family, helped lay the groundwork for Giverny to become an artist’s colony, and began his conversion to Impressionism. During a quick trip back to the United States between 1890 and '91, Breck was among the first to exhibit his new Impressionist paintings, and to use the style to depict the American landscape. He soon became known as one of the leaders of the movement in this country – a reputation that was enhanced by the work he did on a second trip to Giverny in 1891; a series of increasingly well-received exhibitions in Boston in the mid-1890s; and his final series of paintings of Venice after a trip there in 1897.

Reviewing Breck’s first solo exhibition at the St. Botolph Club in 1891, the critic for the Boston Transcript called it “the art sensation of the season,” going on to say that “almost everybody in town has visited the exhibition and almost everybody is discussing it.” Two years later, another critic reflected on the impact of this 1891 exhibition and wrote that “a fierce controversy at once arose between the champions of the old ... and the new ... landscape schools. ... Mr. Breck was at once recognized, by friend and foe, to be the American head [of the latter].” Upon Breck’s suicide in 1899, his colleague John Henry Twachtman, himself one of Impressionism’s American leaders, called Breck “a great genius” and the artist who had “started a new school of painting in America.”

Yet despite the high regard in which Breck was ultimately held in Boston art circles and by his contemporaries at the end of his life, he has largely flown under the art-historical radar since his passing more than a century ago. Consequently, John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist is the first large-scale, museum-organized retrospective of Breck’s work since his memorial exhibition in 1899. It features more than 70 of his finest paintings, many of which have not been on public view since his death, as well as several related works by his colleagues. Figge staffers are delighted to offer patrons an opportunity to see, for the first time, so many of Breck’s groundbreaking paintings gathered in one place, inviting guests to dive into the lush world of his landscapes, to reflect upon their own relationships with the natural world, and to consider anew Breck’s rich legacy.

The opening program for John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist will be presented by Dr. Jonathan Stuhlman, whose June 2 talk – "You Don't know Jack (and you're not alone): Rediscovering John Leslie Breck” – will trace the artist's professional development over the course of his brief career, placing him within the context of American art of his time. The free presentation will take place at 6:30 p.m., the exhibition itself will be on display through May 28, and more information is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.

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