Small museums are not only a treat because of the wonderful gems sometimes found in their collections; they can also one-up larger museums in their ability to be flexible and open minded about their exhibitions. (They often have to be so, when vying to assemble exhibitions by borrowing from larger and more prestigious institutions.) The result can often be small informal exhibitions that larger museums wouldn’t be able to fit into their schedule or display spaces.

Such is the case with a small exhibition at one of my favorite small art museums, The Delaware Art Museum, which has built a tiny but beautiful show around three paintings. An anonymous private collector has loaned the museum three wonderful paintings by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (often simply called James Tissot), a French painter who was dissed for many years as a society fashion artist; which, in fact, he was. (Picture a painter today who specialized in portraying fashionable members of high society decked in haute couture, sharing drinks and gossip at the latest Hollywood party.)

Tissot has only recently regained favor as an accomplished academically trained painter (which he also was, having trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the atielier of Ingres), who combined those skills with the subtle light and color of his friends Whistler and Degas in the service of a keen observation of social realism.

It wasn’t what we usually think of as social realism, revealing the plight of the poor and downtrodden, but rather insightful observations of the lives of the fashionable members of the upper class, among whom Tissot moved comfortably in both Paris and, when the social upheaval of the Commune made things made things too hot there, in London. As an example, see In the Conservatory (sometimes called The Rivals).

The three paintings on loan to the DAM are Mavoureen, (an Irish term meaning “my darling”, also known as Portrait of Kathleen Newton), a beautiful three-quarter length portrait of his mistress and favorite model, which has a feeling of Manet or Degas, Dans le Serre (In the Greenhouse), my favorite of the three as it sits on one of those sublime edges where impressionism meets realism, and Young Ladies Admiring Japanese Objects, a shining little jewel of academic realism and 19th Century Orientalism around which the museum has fleshed out the exhibit with three Japanese woodblock prints from their collection. (I’ve chosen other works to show above, just because I like them and found reproductions online that show Tissot’s style to better advantage than some others.)

Tissot’s scintillating colors and facile technique did little to endear him to critics at the time, or to most of of the Impressionist circle, aside from his two friends, but it works great for me. I love his paintings of beautiful young women, decked out in their finest, amid lush tropical plants and the polished tile floors of conservatories, the sun washed decks of luxury cruise ships and the bright lawns and formal gardens that were the playgrounds of the privileged in London and Paris.

His body of work in these areas was preceded by early history and literary themed paintings and followed by other subjects. The untimely death of his lover, who was stricken with consumption (tuberculosis), left him devastated. He immediately sold his house in St Johns Wood (which was later bought by Alma-Tedema) and moved back to Paris. He became involved in Spiritualism, which was popular at the time, in an attempt to contact the spirit of his beloved Kathleen. Eventually, after frequent visits to churches while researching settings for certain paintings, he had a profound religious experience and he devoted much of his later work to religious themes.

Tissot was also an accomplished etcher, having learned much from Whistler, and sharing with him a fascination with the docks along the Thames waterfront in London (his paintings of which are some of his best work, IMHO). He also shared with Whistler, and many of the Impressionists, a fascination with oriental objects, prints and furnishings.

The Tissot paintings on view at Delaware Art Museum will be there to March 30, 2007. At other times, and in other places, look through the list on Artcyclopedia for museums displaying his work. Reproductions, even those in books, don’t give a real feeling for his wonderful command of color, terrific draughstmanship and deft handling of the medium of oil painting.

I’m not sure “Romantic Realist” is the tagline I would assign to Daniel Garber, but I think it’s possibly more accurate than “Pensylvania Impressionist”, the category to which he is usually assigned.

Daniel Garber: Romatic Realist is the name of a retrospective exhibition, displayed jointly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, here in Philadelphia, where Garber studied and then taught for many years (1909-1950), and the the James A Michener Art Museum in nearby Bucks County, where Garber settled and painted for most of his later life.

I wrote about Garber back in November in anticipation of this show and I finally got to see it on Sunday. The first thing I’ll say is that my already high opinion of this remarkable painter is now even higher. The reason I take issue with either the “Pennnsylvania Impressionist” or “Romantic Realist” labels is that Garber is both. As a friend of mine astutely pointed out at the show, if you get up close, Garber is an impressionist; if you step back, he’s a realist.

Actually, up really close, the surfaces of his paintings, although occasionally spattered with bright daubs and flecks of pure tube color as bright and separate as the most brilliant Monet, are more often reminiscent of the great globs of scumbled, broken color the Expressionists used to exclaim “Paintings are made of paint!“. But, when you step back, and we found ourselves doing a lot of stepping up and back at this show, Garber’s chunks and bumps and scratches and splashes of color somehow, in some remarkable painter’s alchemy, resolve themselves into stunningly beautiful scenes of the Bucks County countryside that can look distinctly representational and “realist”.

Garber has been quoted as saying “I’m not a colorist… I’ve had to work hard for all the color I’ve acquired.” Wow. Here’s an example of hard work paying off. If anything impresses me about Garber, and goes a long way toward explaining his alchemy, it’s his command of color. Not only in the placement of hues in skies and water as brilliant and intense as any exaggeration by Maxfield Parrish, but in unexpected places. I noticed it particularly in the shadows of trees, where a flat single brushstroke of cobalt blue, that up close looks like it couldn’t possibly be a shadow on the bend of a bright sycamore limb, assumes that role when viewed from a few feet back as perfectly as if the limb had been delicately modeled with painstaking blending.

The Parrish comparison is an apt one, both because Garber also worked as an illustrator for a time and because of his Parrish-like intensely colored rock faces and quarry walls, though Garber’s tend to be bleached out by the true light of the Pennsylvania summers, rather than Parrish’s imaginary light from a storybook sun. There were also times when I felt the presence of Pyle and Wyeth, both in the handling of the paint and the kinship of the Bucks County countryside to the hills of the Brandywine Valley. My wife was a Bucks County girl, and I grew up in Delaware near the Brandywine; and Garber’s evocative paintings of these familiar landscapes made us both feel right at home.

Comparisons of Garber with other artists come to mind, including delightful echoes of Corot, and the wonderful mix of realism and Impressionism found in the work of Caillebotte and Sisley. Garber shared with Sisley the repeated theme of framing a scene with darker foreground trees, revealing the scene behind them as bands of color: earth, water and sky. This framing device is one of the things I love most about Garber’s compositions. He makes it work again and again to remarkable effect.

But it is Garber’s ability to suggest that I think painters working in this vein will most admire; whether it is the simple split-hair drybrush suggestion of stands of bare trees against the haze of a distant hillside, or the magically controlled blobby strokes that somehow make a perfect effect of the feathery traces of willows when viewed from a few steps back.

You can also see the influence of other “American Impressionists”, particularly in Garber’s room interiors and figures, areas where he isn’t as as strong as, say, Edmund Tarbell or Childe Hassam, but shines nonetheless. You can also see influence from another great Academy alumni and instructor, Thomas Eakins. Garber studied with Thomas Anshutz, who was a student of Eakins.

The portion of the exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts only runs until Aprli 8, the portion at the Michener is there until until May 6, 2007. The Michener also offers a driving tour (instructions online) of the areas where Garber painted.

I haven’t yet gotten to the Michener Museum’s portion of the show, which covers Garber’s later work (1930-1955) just the portion at the the Academy.

It’s wonderful to see this show hung in the Academy’s beautiful Frank Furness building. The Academy’s portion of the show, which constitutes the larger part and covers his work from 1897 to 1929, includes many of his etchings and beautiful charcoal drawings, including student cast drawings done from casts (plaster replicas of antique sculpture) that were still in use when I was a student at the Academy.