There is a substantial tradition of American Impressionism from the turn of the 20th century with artists like Theodore Robinson, who developed a close relationship with Monet at Giverny. Most of the Americans who had absorbed the style in Paris returned to the Northeastern U.S., often working in colonies. Several of these were along Long Island Sound at Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut and Shinnecock in Eastern Long Island.
Long Island also figured in the birth of the artist Manhattan Arts magazine describes as “the best Impressionist painter of our century,” Master Patrick Antonelle.
Appropriately, Antonelle was born as the resurgence of interest in Impressionism swept the American art scene in the 1950s, and he has spent his life as an artist dedicated to the Impressionist mission of catching the moment in light, directly on the canvas. His work is authentic Impressionism, using subtle tone to create depth and light play that both builds volume and makes the whole world equally insubstantial. His signature is his cityscapes of New York, its parks and buildings – he considered architecture as a career - but his structures shimmer with the same atomic identity as trees and leaves on the ground.
Like the French Impressionists, he follows the changes in natural light, with the strongest contrasts among the seasons: luxuriant summers, golden autumns, winters that reveal the underlying design of nature and fresh, transforming springs. The mood created by his handling of light is calm and the tremendous discipline of his technique contains his radiant palette.
Steeped in New York’s artistic education at the School of Visual Arts, the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the Art Students League, Antonelle goes back to the time of French Impressionism as well as its technique when he places New York’s Flatiron Building in 1906 in Nocturnal New York or fills Fifth Avenue with horse drawn buggies and vintage cars in Winter on Fifth Avenue. Most of his images, though, are timeless and more concerned with the changes of the natural world than those man has imposed. The small figures in his landscapes could be anytime, although he has placed himself inside some of his creations.
The following he commands includes, suitably, former New York mayors Edward Koch and Rudolph Giuliani, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minelli, Leonard Bernstein and Ivana Trump. Corporations from The New York Stock Exchange and the New York Hospital for Special Surgery to Deutsche Bank, Apple Computers and Citicorp are also collectors.
Presented by Sunflower Fine Art
Sunflower Fine Art
(Art gallery, United States)
