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243 Hemingway’s Impressionistic Islands james nagel By the time Grace Hall arrived in New York in 1895, the air was electric with the phenomenon of impressionism. She was there to study voice as a prelude to a life as a wife and mother, but she was also deeply interested in painting, as her frequent visits to the Art Students League testify. She had seen the French impressionists at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the World’s Fair that demonstrated the resurgence of the city after the devastating fire of 1871, and she had a serious interest in painting, an art that would occupy the last two decades of her life. There was no avoiding impressionism in America: it had swept the country in the 1890s, and frequent exhibitions were held in various parts of the country while articles on painting and literature appeared in the periodicals nearly every month, especially in the leading magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. It would not have been lost on her that a local Midwestern writer, Hamlin Garland, had been chosen to explain impressionism to the American public in Chicago, nor that the paintings had attracted so much attention at the exposition that they were loaded on an exhibition train and taken on a national tour, complete with Garland’s explanatory essay. A year later, he published his views on impressionism in his artistic credo, Crumbling Idols, which remained an influential statement for several decades. America had been much more receptive to impressionism than had France, where its first exhibition in Paris had been greeted with confusion and derision . The painters loved it, but the audiences could not figure it out: not the technique, not the subjects, and not the point of it all. So it was natural that as the movement grew, a flood of speeches and essays issued forth to discuss the nature of this sensational new trend in art. What quickly became clear was 244 James Nagel a core principle of the movement: that what the artist was recording was not nature as it is understood to be but nature as it is perceived to be by the senses in a moment of experience, what the Italians called the vistazo. A concern for the artistic representation of immediate impressions required an intense interest in the fluctuation of light and color, in movement, depth, and the special effects inherent in fog, haze, snowfall, distance, and reflections on the water. The sight was to be rendered with objectivity, without the imposition of the artist’s personal feelings about the scene, without preconceptions, historical backgound, classical allusions, or symbolic references. The philosophical implications of the movement are perhaps most significant in the concern for the transcience of reality, for the ineluctable flux in human perceptions of even the most stable of objects, so that Monet could paint numerous pictures of haystacks from the same perspective at different times, and the light, the color, the emphasis, the essence of reality would have changed each time. All of these ideas were received enthusiastically in America from the first important show in New York in 1886, which exhibited more than three hundred paintings by Degas, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, and Renoir. In 1892, when Stephen Crane was living in the Art Students League, Cecelia Waern published “Some Notes on French Impressionism” in the Atlantic Monthly, emphasizing that “the great secret of all impressionism lies in aiming to reproduce, as nearly as possible, the same kind of physical impression on the spectator’s eye that was produced on the eye of the artist by the object seen in nature” (537). Waern was talking about the aesthetic principles of painting, but an identical artistic creed had rapidly formed in literature, influencing the work of Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Ambrose Bierce, and a host of other writers of the period. Perhaps the most influential theoretical formulation of the idea was offered by Joseph Conrad in 1897 in the preface he wrote for The Nigger of the Narcissus, in which he argued that fiction must appeal to the senses: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything ” (xlix). Once Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris and began writing fiction as a professional, he endorsed a virtually identical artistic creed. As he explained to his father, C. E. Hemingway, in a...

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