Tonal Impressionism

style c. 1920s-present California United States

Tonal Impressionism is a style of "mood" painting that keeps Tonalism's simplified compositions and limited palette while borrowing Impressionism's brighter, more chromatic color. The term was coined by art historian Harry Muir Kurtzworth for an exhibition he curated at the Los Angeles Art Association Gallery in the Los Angeles Central Library in June 1937, where prominent California painters showed moonlights, dawn and dusk scenes, and quietly lit interiors rendered in blue and violet tones rather than the earth pigments of traditional California Tonalism. The idea was to work in low-light conditions - studio lamplight, moonrise, sunset - with the full chromatic range of Impressionism. More recently the name has been reused for a method of massing in tonal values without underdrawing.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Simplified compositions reduced to a few large tonal masses
  • Limited palette carefully adjusted to a single key - high or low - for harmonic unity
  • Impressionist chromatic blues and violets used for moonlight and dusk instead of earth pigments
  • Subdued light: dawn, dusk, moonlit nights, quiet interiors
  • Gauzy, indistinct detail with soft "lost" edges
  • Contemporary usage: forms massed in with tone, without outline or underdrawing

Key figures

  • James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) — Tonalist whose harmonies and nocturnes set the mood-painting precedent
  • George Inness (1825-1894) — American Tonalist of simplified, atmospheric landscapes
  • Dwight William Tryon (1849-1925) — Tonalist landscape painter whose method passed to California students
  • Theodore Lukits (1897-1992) — California painter whose moonlit works anchored the 1937 Tonal Impressionism exhibition
  • Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939) — Western painter whose blue moonlight nocturnes embody the style

Example works

  • Idle Hour — Theodore Lukits (c. 1920s)
  • Gesture — Theodore Lukits (c. 1920s-1930s)
  • Spirit of the Missions — Theodore Lukits (c. 1920s-1930s)

Sources

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