Scores of American painters were attracted to Florence in the
19th century and they are now the subject of "Americans in Florence:
Sargent and the American Impressionists."
Henry James had youthful aspirations to become a painter and went
with his brother William to William Morris Hunt's art school in
Newport, Rhode Island, in 1860. But he soon found his true vocation
as a writer.
James captured the 19th-century American expatriate experience of
Italy so masterfully that it is now almost impossible to see it
other than through the author's eyes. No artist, not even John
Singer Sargent, who was born in Florence, in 1856, and remained
deeply attached to the city, ever came to provide a visual
equivalent of the Florence immortalized in James's novels and
Italian essays.
Scores of American painters were attracted to Florence during
this period, and they are now the subject of "Americans in Florence:
Sargent and the American Impressionists," at Palazzo Strozzi,
curated by Francesco Bardazzi and Carlo Sisi.
The exhibition opens with Sargent's "Hotel Room," a wonderful
evocation of the pleasures of arrival in these sunny Mediterranean
climes.
In the next room, featuring "Americans in Florence," we encounter
Sargent's self-portrait, donated to the Uffizi in 1906, his no less
famous portrait of his friend Henry James, and his likeness of the
(English) writer Vernon Lee, a long-term resident of Florence and
friend of both the painter and James.
Among other self-portraits and portraits of visitors who spent
varying lengths of time in Florence and Italy are those of Frank
Duveneck and William Merritt Chase. Both Duveneck and Chase had
studied in Munich in the 1870s. Duveneck spent periods in Florence
when he brought his "Duveneck boys" to the city. This group of
American art students had its origins in Munich and Duveneck also
took them on tours to France, Spain and England. Chase, too, brought
groups of American students to Florence between 1907 and 1913.
Sargent was interested in contemporary Italian painting and keen,
for example, to meet Telemaco Signorini, whose works he admired.
This introduction was made through Vernon Lee, who played a lively
part in the local cultural scene. But most of the visiting American
artists in Florence, and even the longer-term expatriates among
them, seem to have kept to their own community and had little
contact with Italian artists and local artistic developments.
An exception was Elihu Vedder, who was born in New York in 1836
and died in Rome in 1923. Arriving in Florence in 1857, he fell in
with the local Macchiaioli, a proto-Impressionist group of painters
in Tuscany that included the Florentine Signorini and artists from
other parts of Italy. Their excursions into the countryside produced
some of the freshest and most original landscape painting of the era
and Vedder came strongly under their influence, as evidenced here by
five of his paintings, which along with Sargent's are among the most
striking in the exhibition.
Another more integrated figure was Egisto Fabbri, who was born in
New York in 1886 of an Italian father and American mother and to
whom a section entitled "The Circle of Egisto Fabbri: Scholars and
Painters" is devoted. In 1885 he made Florence his home. An
accomplished artist, as the examples of his work here demonstrate,
he nevertheless gave up painting and devoted himself to collecting.
The story of this pioneering purchaser of Cezanne was told in detail
in a previous show at Palazzo Strozzi in 2007.
Fabbri was not the only painter who decided that collecting would
be more rewarding than painting. Francis Alexander was a poor
Connecticut farm boy turned artist, who saved enough to make the
journey to Italy, where he met a Boston heiress whom he later
married. After settling with her in Florence in 1853, he turned to
collecting early Renaissance masters, observing: "What's the use of
painting, when I can buy a better picture for a dollar and a half
than I can paint myself? …
