AMERICAN BEAUTIES:
John Singer Sargent's
A Lady and a Child Asleep in a Punt Under a Willow
When Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Renoir and a handful of other artists most of them French began to abandon the formal rules that had dominated painting until the mid-19th century, they brought into the art world a new spontaneity, luminosity and richness. Their revolutionary way of looking at landscapes, gardens and scenes of leisure had particular resonance in a distant land that, a century earlier, embraced some revolutionary French ideas about politics. "I hated conventional art," said Mary Cassatt, a leading American artist of the 19th and 20th centuries. "When I joined the Impressionists, I began...
