The exhibition celebrates the strong ties between the Old and New Worlds, exploring the cosmopolitan circles that bound Florence to the New World, while transmitting European culture and sophistication to America. Palazzo Strozzi will be hosting the work of the American painters who embraced the artistic vocabulary of Impressionism and spent time in Italy, focusing in particular on their relationship with Florence in the decades spanning the close of the 19th and dawn of the 20th centuries. Visitors will be able to study the work of artists who, while not explicitly subscribing to the Impressionist movement, played a crucial role in forming the new generations of American painters-men like William Morris Hunt, John La Farge and Thomas Eakins. These will be followed by the great forerunners, artists such as John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who could boast of strong cosmopolitan leanings. The main part of the exhibition will consist of work by artists of remarkable quality who spent time in Florence. Their number includes members of the American Impressionist group known as the Ten American Painters-men such as William Merrit Chase and Frederick Childe Hassam.
