The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 42

be numbered among America’s most noted Impres-
sionist landscape painters. As teachers of outdoor
painting, they would also have a profound effect on yet
another generation of painters. In 1891, Chase estab-
lished the first major school of plein-air painting in
America, the Shinnecock Summer School of Art in
Southampton, New York, on Long Island’s South Fork.
About the same time, Twachtman began teaching
summer classes at Cos Cob, Connecticut, shortly
afterward to be joined by Weir, who five years later
directed his own outdoor classes at his home in
Branchville, Connecticut.
In fact, the Tile Club provided an important social
forum for its members, from the time they returned
from their extensive studies abroad, sophisticated but
penniless, to the time they emerged a decade later as
successful artists who could resume their ties to the
continent. In the closing paragraphs of A Book of the
Tile Club, Earl Shinn aptly reveals the group’s very
special nature: “The ideas…discussed were produced
unaffectedly from the Vatican, the thieves’ quarter in
London….The streets of Naples, Vienna, and Al-
giers were about equally present in their minds; and
Detail from: The Tile Club at Work, 1879, etching on paper.
36 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting
they assembled around their friendly table in coats
from Oxford and from Madrid, in shoes half worn on
the sides of Vesuvius and in galleries of Gibraltar…
All these comrades, challenging each other by names
that were meaningless to the cold world.” 145 Perhaps
this statement, more than anything else, captures the
essence of the Tile Club. Through their mutual experi-
ence, perseverance, and most important, their art, they
managed in one decade to establish a new and more
cosmopolitan identity for American art, as well as a
greater appreciation and respect for a new breed of
American artist.