Unlike the French Impressionists, there was really no formal group that called themselves “American Impressionists”; this is a label writers have applied to American painters who adopted elements of Impressionist style and technique to their work.

There was however, “The Ten American Painters”, a group of painters from New York and Boston who withdrew from the Society of American Artists in protest of that group’s commercialism and restrictive styles, and devoted themselves to new styles of painting, largely influenced by French Impressionism. The group includes John Henry Twatchman, Edmund Charles Tarbell, William Merritt Chase and J. Alden Weir, among others.

One of the founding members of that group, and along with Tarbell and Chase, one of the most important of the painters referred to as “American Impressionists”, was Massachusetts painter Childe Hassam (pronounced “child HASS-em”).

Hassam started as an illustrator and worked primarily in watercolor. He went to Paris in search of a formal art education (as was common for American artists at the time) and studied oil painting at the Académie Julian. He later discounted that teaching but returned from Paris dramatically impressed (if you’ll excuse the expression) with the daring new style of those radical upstarts from the Salon de Refusés, the Impressionists.

His own work showed that influence in many ways, there are numerous paintings of flower gardens bursting with dabs of pure color, street scenes with finely dressed gentry awash in dappled sun and landscapes blanketed in brightly lit snow. But he also diverged in may ways from the Impressionist path.

His work would often dwell on themes of rain-drenched streets, late day sun and misty twilight, more in keeping with the muted whispers of Whistler’s nocturnes than the mid-day kaleidoscopic dazzle of Monet. He would break his color into rough chunks and patches, very different from the individual dabs of “pure color” favored by Impressionist theory, and explore the rich darks of room interiors, like his fellow member of “The Ten”, Edmund Tarbell.

Hassam was also a superb etcher, again more akin to Whistler than the Impressionists. There are excellent examples of his work in major museums in the US, particularly, as you might expect, on the East Coast.

Like the French Impressionists, the American Impressionists are popular subjects for publishers and there are numerous books on Hassam and his explorations of brilliant color and subtle light.

Transcendence, spirituality and mysticism have been themes in painting for hundreds of years.

Texas-based painter A. Andrew Gonzalez paints mystical-themed images, often of female faces or figures surrounded by radiant lines of light, and at times overlayed with intricate surface patterns.

The Gallery on his site features images from periods in which his work has evolved through several stages, but always focusing on themes of illumination, revelation or transcendence. The “illumination” is sometimes represented literally by figures whose heads are ablaze with shafts of light or halos.

His latest pieces, as in the example at left, are extraordinary monochromatic works which at first glance look more like photographs of intricate alabaster or marble reliefs than paintings.

Gonzalez works using aribrushed acrylic on ClayBoard or canvas. He pulls the forms out by lifting pigment with an abrasive eraser and then overlays new values with layers of transparent pigment.

Gonzales was very influenced by visionary Austrian Fantastic Realist painter Ernst Fuchs, with whom he had the opportunity to work in Monaco and Austria.

Gonzalez also lists the Pre-Raphaelites and other visionary painters like William Blake, Jean Delville, Robert Venosa and Alex Grey among his influences. He also was influenced in a different way by the dark visions of H. R. Geiger, to which he considers his work an antithesis.

Gonzalez’s site also includes works in progress, sketches and drawings.

Qi Baishi was a Chinese painter whose long life and career extended from the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries.

When he was young his frailty made him incapable of working the lands of his family farm and he was permitted to apprentice to a carpenter. He went on into cabinet making and carving and upon discovering The Mustard Seed Garden, the traditional manual of Chinese painting, determined to achieve a mastery of painting. He studied traditional techniques for many years and at the age of 40 began to develop the style for which he would be known in his mature career.

His early work, which I like a lot, is more like traditional Chinese landscape painting, his mature style was a turn on the schools that emphasized the portrayal of simple small bits of nature rather than grand landscapes. He combined that ink painting style with modern colors and is renowned for his deceptively simple, colorful and intimate portrayals of flowers, insects, vegetables and grass blades.