Robert Vonnoh

Landscape and figure painter Robert Vonnoh was an early American adherent of impressionism, the late-nineteenth century movement to paint outdoor scenes using bright colors and unblended brushstrokes. Vonnoh was raised in Roxbury, near Boston, Massachusetts, and as a teenager was apprenticed to a publisher of lithographic prints. In 1875 he began four years of study at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. He then taught drawing and exhibited his portrait drawings at the Boston Arts Club before traveling to Paris in 1881 to study painting. At the Académie Julian, Vonnoh studied under French figural artists Gustave Boulanger (1824–88) and Jules-Joseph Lefèbvre (1836–1911). Two years later, his portrait of a fellow student was accepted into the prestigious juried annual exhibition known as the Paris Salon.

Vonnoh returned to Boston in 1883 and spent a decade there teaching and exhibiting his paintings, which were favorably received. Recently married, Vonnoh and his wife went back to France in 1887, settling into the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing, a rural French village only two hours by train from Paris. Grez attracted landscape painters from Britain, America, and Scandinavia interested in new approaches to capturing outdoor light and color. Vonnoh began to paint landscapes in which he recreated the effects of strong sunlight in distinct strokes of brilliant pure color, using deep reds and purples rather than the conventional black and brown to depict shadows. However, he typified American impressionists in adhering to the fundamentals of his traditional academic training. For example, he continued to paint conventional portraits using deep tones graduating to near-black shadows, and even his brightly colored landscapes exhibit an overall compositional structure that is distinct from the fully impressionist work of his European contemporaries. In some outdoor figural works, Vonnoh’s varied approach is evident in the contrast between the carefully delineated contours of the figures and the colorism and spontaneity with which he rendered setting and background.

Vonnoh returned to the United States in 1891 and became an influential and popular teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He also exhibited his landscape paintings with success. In 1899 the widowed Vonnoh married sculptor Bessie Potter with whom he often exhibited. The couple moved to New York and also worked for many years in the summer artists’ colonies of Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, important sites for the development of American impressionism in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1907, they returned to Grez, where Vonnoh remained until 1911. He continued to spend time there annually until the outbreak of World War I, and took up residence there again in 1922, remaining more or less permanently in France. By the time of Vonnoh’s death at the age of seventy-five, impressionism was outmoded, but recent scholarship has acknowledged his important role in its American development.