The influence of French Impressionism spread out in waves from the original movement’s epicenter in Paris. Some of the waves beached in various parts of the U.S., where artists who later came to be known as American Impressionists began adopting elements of the style — first in the northeast, then somewhat later in California.

There were more isolated ripples in other areas as well. In Texas, painter and teacher Robert Jenkins Onderdonk traveled to New York in the mid 19th century to study with American painter William Merritt Chase.

His son, Robert Julian Onderdonk, also studied with Chase later in the New York painter’s career, and took his Impressionist influences much more completely into his own style and ran with them, going on to produce vibrantly colorful paintings of the Texas landscape.

While his father’s interest had been in Chase’s reputation as a portrait painter, Julian Onderdonk more enthusiastically adopted Chase’s alla prima approach and practice of plein air landscape painting, capturing the light of the day directly onto his canvas.

After painting in New York for a time, he returned to Texas and established himself as a painter and teacher, to some extent in his father’s footsteps.

Julian Onderdonk particularly became known for his landscapes of fields of Texas bluebonnets in bloom, and is considered one of Texas’ most important artists.

My impression (if you’ll excuse the word) is that his reputation as a painter of bluebonnets has distracted from his general work as a landscape painter.

He is sometimes mentioned with Granville Redmond, a California Impressionist who made a more dedicated practice of painting fields of wildflowers, and Onderdonk’s fame as “The Bluebonnet Painter” (which he hated), has been reinforced by generations of lesser painters who have devoted their careers to painting fields of the Texas state flower.

I also think that Onderdonk has been unfairly overlooked in discussions of American Impressionism, which tend to focus on the art colonies on the two coasts.

There is a collection of his work, Julian Onderdonk: American Impressionist, that I believe is out of print but available used.

Croatian artist Mato Celestin Medović was best known as a history painter, creating large, elaborately detailed tableaux of coronations and other events from recent or ancient history. In these he excelled in capturing the kind of subtly rich color and sensitive attention to surfaces and materials for which his contemporary Victorian English painters and French Academic artists were noted.

Though his early education at a Fransciscan monastery near his home eventually led to his early artistic training in Italy, it was later study at the Academy of Arts In Munich that was more in keeping with his initial artistic direction.

In his later career, he left the Franciscan order and lived in Zagreb, where he began to infuse his work with more vibrant color.

In the latter part of his career he returned to his native area on the Pelješac peninsula, where he lived alone and painted subjects uncharacteristic of his earlier work, and of Croatian artists in general at the time — still life, seascapes and landscapes, many of which were smaller and directly from nature.

In these later works Medović experimented with Pointillism and explored the impasto brushwork, short strokes and intense color associated with Impressionism.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find many sources of images by Medović. I learned of his work from the excellent blog of contemporary Croation artist Valentino Radman where I came across his article about a Medović retrospective earlier this year, and found another mention of Medović here. There is also an article mentioning Croatian masters on Radman’s blog with additional images on Underpaintings.

There are few images on Wikimedia Commons and a Wikipedia bio.

I also found this site, which is set in a little frame so small it’s bizarre; I’ve broken out the individual pages for the gallery and bio.