Paris on my mind

During the 19th century Paris changed dramatically, doubling in size each decade. The Champs-Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe on the Place de l’Etoile and the Place de la Concorde were completed; Notre Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle were restored. The creation of wide new boulevards, parks and public spaces led poet Charles Baudelaire to lament, ‘‘The old Paris is no more; the shape of a city/Changes more quickly, alas! than a mortal’s heart.’’

But this unique mix of the ancient and the modern captivated American artists. ‘‘It was an amazing experience,’’ says co-curator Erica Hirshler of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where the exhibit will travel later this year. ‘‘For an artist to get to a place where art was so central to life must have been a stunning and wonderful thing.’’ Each artist had a different vision of Paris, and most found exquisite beauty in the everyday.

Sargent’s entrancing In the Luxembourg Gardens (1879) is suffused with pearly moonlight and airy brushstrokes. Cassatt’s vibrant paintings of the theater, such as Woman With a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879), portray members of the audience rather than the play, suggesting where she felt the true drama lay. Cassatt, Sargent and Whistler— all fluent in French—found it easy to mix in Parisian society, which helped their work. Sargent must have had sympathetic patrons in the Boit family, for instance, as they allowed their eldest daughter’s features to be obscured to enhance the dark mystery of his 1882 work The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. The four brooding figures depict a vision of childhood that is distinct from any contemporary French portrait.

Most Americans craved recognition within the conventional hierarchy of Parisian art, which was the ticket to success around Europe as well as back home. This meant exhibiting at the annual Salon of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where crowds of up to 10,000 a day peered at thousands of new paintings and sculpture. Their unique interpretations often sparked controversy. Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862) was turned down by the salon of 1863, along with so many other works, that the Emperor Napoleon III gave in to a public outcry and agreed to display rejected works in a Salon des Refuses.

‘‘Ideas that were fired by French art become transformed when the artists return to the US,’’ says Hirshler. ‘‘They’re not trying to imitate French art. They incorporate it and use it as a foundation for their own, very diverse styles.’’ The strength of each of the works in this show lies in the artists’ different, but always impassioned, engagement with Paris.

(Newsweek)