In Their Footsteps: Deborah Pierce Bonnell Paints Weir Farm

In a month-long exhibition at the Storehouse Gallery Museum Shop, In Their Footsteps – Deborah Pierce Bonnell Paints Weir Farm will feature works painted by Bonnell as a 2016 artist-in-residence at Weir Farm. All will be available for purchase.

[...] Now a National Historic Site, Weir Farm was a setting [....] that American Impressionists loved and painted frequently. Weir’s circle of friends, noted American artists John Twachtman, Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent and Albert Pinkham Ryder, often visited and drew inspiration from the farm’s bucolic vistas, many of which remain intact today.

Bonnell, as artist-in-residence in September, 2016, was able to spend three weeks traversing the very same paths, meadows and woods that these prominent artists walked a century ago. Using oil on canvas, encaustic on panel, watercolor on paper and even iPad digital paintings, she captured her own impressions. Says Bonnell, “As a landscape painter, I was able to immerse myself, not only in the beauty of the place, but in being removed from our hectic, modern sense of time and to imagine what it must have been like there at the turn of the twentieth century. I have come full circle. By working on the same ground as these artists whom I have come to love, I have connected on even more levels.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, American Impressionism, 2nd Edition is an expanded and revised edition of an elegant and definitive volume which helped establish the ever-growing passion for American Impressionism. All the masterworks are here, from Childe Hassam's sun-drenched gardens to John Twachtman's snow-silenced landscapes. Documentary photographs of the artists and quotations from their private letters and journals complement the text and provide a vivid sense of their lives and times. Expanded with a new chapter discussing the themes particular to the American artists of the Impressionist movement and twenty-five new illustrations. 

American Impressionism, 2nd Edition