The question of who among American painters practiced the most refined form of impressionism pervades an exhibition at the Reading Public Museum called "The Lure of the Artists' Colony."
The show calls attention to a defining characteristic of the American movement - the proclivity of impressionist painters to gather in picturesque places, often by the sea, to paint and socialize.
New Hope was one such place, and it was a legitimate colony in that it was permanent, rather than a seasonal rendezvous such as Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Conn.; Rockport and Cape Ann (meaning Gloucester), Mass., and Ogunquit, Maine.
The New Hope artists shouldn't require an introduction to residents of this region, but the other colonies may be less familiar. On that level alone this show has something interesting to convey. The artists are grouped in galleries according to the places with which they were most commonly identified.
Museum curator Scott Schweigert adopted that organizing theme as a way to impose logic on what might otherwise be an amorphous mass, given that all 82 paintings and 28 works on paper (mostly prints) are owned by the museum.
This in itself is a startling fact; how did a small regional institution come to own so much American impressionism? The answer, Schweigert says, is that both the museum and private collectors in the area gravitated toward impressionism during the roughly 20 to 25 years after the museum was founded in 1913.
Schweigert installed the show contextually. It begins with a nod to two prominent expatriates, Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, and to New York artists, particularly William Merritt Chase, an early exponent of the impressionist approach who ran his own summer colony at Shinnecock on Long Island.
