In this definitive study of Pennsylvania impressionism's leading artist, Constance Kimmerle offers both an accessible biographical study of Edward Redfield (1869-1965) as well as a rich discussion of his role in the changes that swept the American art world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Pennsylvania Impressionists is the first book to focus on the Pennsylvania School of Landscape Painting. Starting in 1898, a group of Impressionist painters began to settle on the outskirts of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Although largely forgotten by the 1950s, these artist comprised a major school of landscape painting. Today, considerable interest has been generated by this school. The leading figure in this group, Edward Redfield, was noted for his large, broadly and vigorously painted snow scenes, which he completed at "one go" or in a single afternoon. He developed a major reputation in American art, and was awarded more honors and prizes than any other American artist, with the exception of John Singer Sargent.

Americans were introduced to Impressionism by the French in the 1880s. They explored its expressive potential and debated its merits in the 1890s, and by the turn of the 20th century, American painters had seized the style for their own. Included here are thirty superb examples of American Impressionist painting by the seminal artists who redefined the movement for American audiences, including Frank W. Benson, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, John Henry Twachtman, and others.An essay by Kevin Sharp examines the unintentional circumstances and deliberate efforts that transformed Impressionism from an expression of the French vanguard into an international style, and eventually, into a peculiarly American enterprise.

Charles Sheeler in Doylestown investigates one artist's lifelong engagement with the rich, distinctive traditions of rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It charts Sheeler's discovery of the region's architecture and artifacts beginning about 1910, when he and fellow artist Morton Livingston Schamberg rented an 18th-century farmhouse in Doylestown. It assesses the impact this seminal event had on Sheeler's early career, and how his cyclical return to Bucks County themes in later life reveals poignant attachments and emotional depths not usually ascribed to this 20th-century painter and photographer -- known primarily as an iconographer of the machine.