John Leslie Breck (1860-1899) was one of the founders of the American
art colony at Giverny and was among the earliest American artists to
embrace the Impressionist style. He was also one of the first to exhibit
his Impressionist paintings in America and helped to popularize the
style during his years working in the Boston area in the 1890s. Between
1887 and 1888 he and a handful of his American colleagues began visiting
the French village of Giverny, where they met Claude Monet and
subsequently explored the new approach to painting that Monet had helped
to pioneer. Breck's canvases from this period, loosely brushed and
filled with light and color, are a marked departure from his earlier
works that are characterized by darker tonalities and tighter brushwork
that typified the preferred style of the era. When Breck returned to
America in 1892, he applied what he had learned to paintings of the New
England landscape and frequently exhibited his work. Inspired by The
Mint Museum's 2016 acquisition of John Leslie Breck's canvas Suzanne
Hoschedé-Monet Sewing, this volume includes approximately 70 of Breck's
finest works, drawn from public and private collections. Along with his
scenes of Giverny and America, this volume features a selection of
paintings from his sojourn in Venice in 1897. Always interested
exploring in new ways of seeing the world, Breck had begun to explore
aspects of post-Impressionism and Asian aesthetics in the years before
his early death, at the age of 39, in 1899. This volume also features up
to 36 additional comparative images, including details, photographs, and
paintings by Monet and other leading American impressionists including
Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, Lila Cabot Perry, Childe Hassam, and
Arthur Wesley Dow, presented throughout the main essays and chronology
and appendices.
