Turn-of-the-century American impressionism and realism.

• Position: Various artists, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

One genteel, the other gritty and uncompromising, these two artistic movements portray the nation's rich cultural and natural diversity.

Two important movements in the history of painting are featured in the exhibition, "American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915." Highlighted are works by the leading artists of both schools, including John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Belows.

For the first time in a major exhibition, the two groups of painters are aligned and their output examined thematically, in relation to the dynamic period that provoked their creation. To illuminate the similarities as well as the differences among the painters and works of the two groups, the focus is on the three broad subjects the artist of each movement explored: the country, city, and home.

"The American Impressionists and Realists saw themselves as two opposed groups of artists, and they have since been presented as such by many critics and scholars," explains Philippe de Montebello, director, Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York. "This exhibition, however, serves to realign the two groups to suggest that the continuities between them are more important than previously perceived, and the contrasts far more subtle."

Although the American Impressionists and Realists reached their maturity in different centuries, painters from both groups shared common backgrounds. They all benefited from some measure of academic training, appreciated the works of certain Old Masters, and adopted the manner of the French Impressionists. In general, the American Impressionists came from comfortable families long established in the U.S., while the Realists were more socially and economically diverse. Yet, despite differences in technique, rhetoric, and social background, most of the American Impressionists and Realists chose the same characteristically native subjects and produced an artistic register of an energetic nation caught in the throes of rapid change from an agrarian to an increasingly industrialized, urban society.

American Impressionism is represented by the lightly brushed, high-key works that such artists as Chase and Hassam executed in the late 1800s; Realism, by the darkertoned urban scenes that Henri, Sloan, and their colleagues of the so-called "Ashcan School" produced beginning about 1905. In each group, though, there were painters who...