Tonalist paintings are softly expressive, suggestive rather than detailed, often depicting the landscape at twilight or evening, when there is an absence of contrast.
At the same time, the parallel Pictorialist Photography movement was born with gauzy landscapes and figurative photographs that bore a strong resemblance to Tonalist Paintings.
In the annual Salons, the American painters were exposed to the soft, simple, muted Barbizon landscapes of forests and ponds painted by artists like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), Rosseau and Diaz de la Pena.
They also saw the roughly painted peasant scenes by Jean-François Millet, who lived in the tiny village of Barbizon, south of Paris.
Hunt's student John La Farge (1835–1910) also carried the Barbizon torch and developed his own, expressive versions of the French works.
Other painters who were similarly influenced were Alexander Wyant (1836–1892), Henry Ward Ranger (1858–1916), Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925) and Charles Warren Eaton (1857–1937).
As American artists who had traveled or studied abroad brought the Barbizon style back with them, even homegrown talents were influenced.
Because he lived and studied in Paris, he was familiar with the Barbizon School and knew a number of the French artists, but he was also a major exponent of Japonisme, the European and American movement influenced by Japanese art, especially their woodblock prints.
She began taking photographs about 1901 and was soon considered one of the leaders of the Pictorialist movement in the San Francisco Bay area.
Harry Muir Kurtzworth, who was Fine Art Curator for the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Art and Architecture from 1930 to 1932 seems to be the first one to establish the term Tonal Impressionism which he used to describe paintings done in the Tonalist manner with simplified compositions, a limited but which utilized the brighter, more chromatic palette of Impressionism.
The artists he included were Charles Bensco, Frank Tolles Chamberlin, Alson Clark, Clyde Forsyth, Ralph Holmes, Thodore Lukits, J. Mason Reeves, and Seymour Thomas.
The large body of work the California artist Theodore Lukits did in the pastel medium or the hundreds of moonlit scenes painted by the Western painter Frank Tenney Johnson, may best exemplify this approach.