Ex-collection:
Private collection, until the present

In the late 1880s, John Leslie Breck was drawn to Giverny and the Impressionism of Claude Monet. He was one of a few Americans to enter Monet's inner circle, and the New York-born artist became an early exponent of the "new painting." After a failed romance with Monet's stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschedé, he returned to Boston in 1890 and continued to paint in this avant-garde style. He exhibited at the St. Botolph Club in Boston in October 1890, and his Impressionist canvases provoked lively response in Boston and New York. His premature death in 1899 elicited a memorial exhibition at the St. Botolph Club, at which time the leadership and direction of the Boston school had been assumed by Edmund Tarbell.

Some of Breck's most memorable canvases were executed after his return to America. He spent the remainder of his life painting along the Massachusetts coast, and some of his best work includes views of Ipswich. Moonlight, Ipswich, painted around 1894, clearly reflects the palette of Monet but also demonstrates Breck's masterful assimilation of Impressionist brushwork and strong sense of composition. Breck had begun to paint by moonlight in Giverny in 1888. In 1896 he went to Venice, and in 1897 painted Santa Maria della Salute by Moonlight (Indianapolis Museum of Art). A reviewer in the Boston Evening Transcript wrote on May 3, 1899 of this painting that he found it "one of those happy inspirations, perchance the token of a new departure, which occasionally occur to painters, and mark the turning of a fresh leaf, the beginning of a new chapter." This review certainly applied to the great canvases that Breck produced upon his return to America.

© 1997 Adelson Galleries, Inc