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Though the term “Impressionism” typically conjures up images of the lively cafés and grand boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris, multiple members of this seminal artistic cohort possessed close professional, familial, and historic ties to the Americas, leading them to mine these regions for artistic inspiration. Caribbean-born artists Camille Pissarro (US Virgin Islands, 1830–1903) and Francisco Oller (Puerto Rico, 1833–1917) lived and worked in Europe and the Americas, presaging, adapting, and even abandoning the ideological precepts and aesthetic language of Impressionism at different moments throughout their careers. The existence of these understudied networks of artistic production and exchange challenge the Benjaminian notion of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century, revealing the highly globalized nature of the art world during a moment of extraordinary political volatility and social change. This project explores the work of Caribbean contemporaries Pissarro and Oller within the social, political, and artistic milieus of the Americas in the nineteenth century. My project follows their work across oceans and hemispheres, travels often undertaken by artists in the age of telegraphy, railroads, and steamships, and yet rarely pursued by the scholars who study them. As a result, the unilateral relationship between Paris and the world gives way to a rhizomatic web of hemispheric and transatlantic exchanges where understudied geographic locals such as Caracas, Venezuela, Charlotte-Amalie, St. Thomas, and San Juan, Puerto Rico emerge as critical points of artistic encounter. In departing from the hegemony of the Parisian metropolis, the global entanglements of nineteenth-century artistic production, rarely broached in the art historical literature, can be more fully understood. / Art History

Robert Henri is regarded as the quintessential American Realist and the outspoken representative of the Ashcan artists. Inspired by his philosophy of artistic practice, Henri's followers embraced their individuality and represented their engagement with the realities of modern life. For his own part, however, Henri never truly adopted the reformist style embraced by the Ashcan Realists. Instead, his art remained torn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words, there is a fundamental division between the philosophy that aligned Henri with his pupils and the style and substance of his own artistic practice. By looking back to Henri's formative years—when he dabbled in impressionism, symbolism, and aestheticism—we can gain a fuller understanding of the dichotomous, sometimes contradictory nature of his more conservative artistic practice and his progressive philosophy of art. Reexamination also connects Henri to the influential artists of the nineteenth century, such as James McNeill Whistler, who contributed to his complex artistic philosophy, style, and technique. Throughout this project follows Henri's navigation of a range of anti-academic, late-nineteenth century art traditions in combination with more academic practice to reconsider Henri's lasting interest in nineteenth century modernisms. Most relevant to our modern moment, this project takes a second look at his portraits of Chinese Americans, which are conventionally read through the lens of "realism." Not "honest" representations, these portraits are tempered by Henri's imagination, popular culture, and the Japonisme of Whistler, the Impressionists, and the Symbolists. Finally, critical reconsideration of Henri's publication "The Art Spirit" reveals the lasting legacy of nineteenth-century thought in Henri's philosophy of art even as it inspires more forward-thinking practice. / Art History

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