In The Coffee House, Alson Skinner Clark painted Chicago on a winter day, with ice floating down the river and the city’s skyscrapers looming through smoke and fog. The State Street Bridge, with its characteristic curving ironwork, draws the viewer’s eye into the picture. Clark’s scene is in the tradition of the urban realism of the French Impressionists, recalling such pictures as Claude Monet’s Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare. Like Monet, Clark sought to suggest both the ephemeral nature of fog and smoke and the atmosphere’s effect upon the forms of the city.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Judith A. Barter et al., The Age of American Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2011), no. 90.
Art Institute of Chicago, Nineteenth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists Oct. 16–Nov. 29, 1906, cat. 76.
Art Institute of Chicago, First Exhibition of Works by Former Students and Instructors of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jan. 8–Feb. 7, 1918, cat. 98.
Aurora, Illinois, Fine Arts Building, Old Fair Grounds, Central States Fair and Exposition, Aug. 4–12, 1922.
Art Institute of Chicago, Half a Century of American Art, Nov. 16, 1939–Jan. 7, 1940, cat. 37.
Chicago, University Club Lobby, Oct. 17, 1951–June 3, 1954.
Art Institute of Chicago, Art in Illinois in Honor of the Illinois Sesquicentennial, June 15–Sept. 8, 1968, checklist, p. 3.
St. Louis Art Museum, Currents of Expansion: Painting in the Midwest, 1829–1940, Feb. 18–Apr. 10, 1977, cat. 80, as Coffee House.
Art Institute of Chicago, Centennial Exhibition; Alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Nov. 23, 1979–Jan. 20, 1980, cat. 26.
Sacramento, California, Crocker Art Museum, California Light, 1900–1930, June 22–Aug. 26, 1990, cat. 119; Laguna Art Museum, Oct. 12, 1990–Jan. 6, 1991; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Feb. 7–Mar. 15, 1991.
Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago Modern: 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, July 17, 2004–Oct. 31, 2004.
Shanghai Museum, Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, Sept. 28, 2018–Jan. 6, 2019, cat. 39.
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