Crossing continents

When a Bostonian wit remarked, ‘Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris’, he was merely expressing the secure place the French capital occupied in the nation’s heart. Paris represented a dream (or reality for the increasing number who travelled there) of happiness, a spiritual or physical home, the premier destination for thousands of American artists and art students. Many who went, perhaps as many as a third, were women. As one of their number, the little-known painter Cecilia Beaux, remarked, ‘Everything is there.’ Three of her paintings are included here, among a glittering list of 87 exhibits by more than 30 artists. This is not just another exhibition tagging on the shirt-tails of the Impressionists. The range is extensive, the mixture of known and unknown is stimulating, the total effect deeply impressive. Such a relief after that half-baked exhibition at the Royal Academy last summer, Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting.