Arts At the Bermuda National Gallery from September 27, 1997 to January 9, 1998.

*** The Bermuda National Gallery's current loan exhibition, Light, Air and Colour: American Impressionist Paintings from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is not at all a ground-breaking show, but it is very lovely to look at and worth a leisurely visit.

The story of French Impressionism is probably as well known as Whistler's Mother. In Paris in 1874 a break-away group, disenchanted with the formal confines of the Academy des Beaux Arts, held their first independent show together. Renouncing highly finished studio works that depicted standard historical or literary themes (rapes of the Sabines, and the like), painters as distinct as Cezanne, Degas and Renoir formed a loosely-knit alliance.

They showed paintings that were quickly executed out of doors -- vignettes of everyday, bourgeois life or glimpses of nature. Their name and their working practices, suggested by the title of a Monet picture, Impression: Sunrise, broke the mold of the French Academy and changed the history of painting for ever.

Impressionism in America is a different story. Most American Impressionist works were produced after the movement has passed its prime in France. In fact, Impressionism had been superseded by a succession of other ways of painting within a decade of its establishment, styles we now lump together for convenience as Post-Impressionism.

Despite the presence of a number of American expatriate painters in Paris (like the Pennsylvania Academy-trained Mary Cassatt), group impressionism in America happened quite a little while after the event, and later still in Pennsylvania than in Boston or New York.

But the sea-changed to Impressionism was generally well received by picture-buying Americans. When the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel sent a group of 300 French paintings to New York in 1886, there was an enthusiastic response, and soon the academically-trained Americans were themselves experimenting with the techniques. Brushwork became freer, and colours lighter, more luminous. Many entered so far into the true spirit of the method that they made it genuinely their own.

When they returned home to Connecticut or Massachusetts after their exciting cosmopolitan years abroad, there was a hardening of their subject choices which reflected the continued impact of the market. The buying public had always responded favourably to landscape, which has its own special meaning in American art. But the glories of earlier grandiose vistas that spoke of manifest destiny were now tamed, shrunk down to a manageable, domestic scale.

With the frontier conquered, Impressionists depicted the cozy environments of seaside resort or prosperous, cultivated suburb. They painted places that their patrons were familiar with, that part of the American ideal they wanted to see. They painted what contemporary writer William Dean Howells called "the smiling aspects of life.'' During the years of Impressionism's development, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which is the country's oldest art school and museum, exhibited only a token painting or two. It was not until 1892, under the new direction of Harrison Morris, that Impressionism was displayed in its full force and as a distinctive style. It then proved so popular that it continued to be made by ardent painters there long after it had run its course in Europe.

The Academy hired teachers who had had exposure in Europe to both Academic and impressionist training; a regional colony in nearby New Hope developed and thrived for two generations; and pictures by the leading American exponents were systematically purchased for its permanent collection.

It is a select group from this collection that we can see now at the National Gallery, and it comprises both works by Pennsylvania painters and by other regional American Impressionists purchased by the Academy at this time. The show is a necessarily abbreviated version of an original exhibition held at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1990.

Several important works have not been sent to Bermuda because the paintings had other obligations, and it is disappointing not to be able to see major works by John Twachtman and Childe Hassam, or anything at all by Maurice Prendergast. It is a pity, too, that Cecilia Beaux's flawless colonial revival portrait of her cousin, Julia Leavitt Richards, was omitted in favour of a small sketch of two Breton women.

However, the revised display at the National Gallery, which is hung to great advantage, still has plenty to offer the eye, and plenty of points to make.

Paintings -- shown in their splendid period frames, which help create a nostalgia for turn-of-the-century rooms -- are of the quiet themes of middle-class American taste. There are seaside villages where you took your holiday (Ernest Lawson's Peggy's Cove, 1924); wooded suburbs with the old house peeping through the trees (Henry Asbury Rand's Snow Shadows, 1914); tranquil gardens of the artist (Theodore van Soelen's Summer Morning, 1915); scenes where winter yields inevitably to spring (Walter Elmer Scholfied's Winter; 1899); quite domestic moments between mother and child (Karl Anderson's The Heirloom, 1915); still-life groupings (John Twachtman's Flowers, 1893); and portraits (Joseph T. Pearson Jr.'s Emily, 1906).

Despite their different ways of handling paint strokes or the variety of influences in their methods of composition, these artists display in common a genteel resistance to the upheavals of modern American life which was taking place at that time. The portraits are particularly telling. In Cecila Beaux's rather academic-looking portrait of the two little Henry sisters in pure white dresses, we can read the purposeful statement of the need for separateness of this particular social class.

How different this if from the reality of another facet of turn-of-the-century America, that of the urban poor. Although challenged after 1900 by the Eight painters of the Ashcan school, who found more real life in the subjects of social realism drawn from industrial cities, many Impressionists went on as if untouched by the realities of modern times. Some worked in the style as late as the 1950s.

It is ironic to note that many of the Eight were originally also trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and that they created out of earlier Impressionist techniques an authentically American modern movement.

The Bermuda National Gallery, which has now been open for five years, has moved slowly and steadily from tentative beginnings towards true professionalism. The show is a milestone in their progress, and they share it with the American International Company, the sole sponsors of the show, who themselves celebrate their golden anniversary in Bermuda. We owe them a debt of gratitude for their generosity.

SYLVIA SHORTO ASTERS -- This still life study, painted by Everett L. Bryant (circa 1912) forms part of the exhibition of American Impressionist paintings from the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) currently on show at the Bermuda National Gallery. (Photo: PAFA) ART REVIEW REV ART