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Southern Hospitality


A Family of Birches Greenville, South Carolina, hosts our traveling show American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum starting today.

Greenville County Museum of Art displays fifty of our best works of impressionism through September 1, 2002.

Willard Metcalf was one of the first Americans to visit Claude Monet's studio at Giverny. Following the French impressionists, he used loose brush strokes to capture the effects of light in New England landscapes. This tranquil scene may have been painted at Old Lyme, Connecticut, an artists' colony where Metcalf visited frequently from 1903 to 1907.

Source: Joann Moser. American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Willard F. Metcalf, 1858–1925, A Family of Birches, oil, 1907, 29 x 26 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans.