This beautiful volume was published to accompany the exhibition, An Impressionist Sensibility, at the Smithsonian Institution's American Art Museum, which celebrated the Museum's reopening in the restored Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. At the heart of the exhibition is a remarkable collection of paintings amassed in the late 1980s by Texans Hugh and Marie Halff. The works range from Ernest Lawson's celebration of modern urbanism in his Flatiron Building (1906-07), to the exoticism of Harry Siddons Mowbray's Two Women (1893-96), and the harmonious plein-air geometry of Theodore Robinson's The Anchorage,Cos Cob (1894). The Halff's collection spans the period in American art known as ?The Gilded Age', when Ruskin's credo of ?truth to nature' gave way to Whistler's rallying cry of ?art for art's sake'. AUTHOR: Eleanor Jones Harvey is chief curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum, prior to which she was curator of American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, and assistant curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is a leading specialist in nineteenth-century art. 80 colour illustrations
