Pennsylvania Impressionism

The Pennsylvania Impressionists, a key movement in American Impressionism, influenced major artists such as Walter Schofield (1867–1944), George Sotter (1879–1953) and Henry Snell (1858–1943).

Charles Ramsey, Lloyd Ney's good friend, was disturbed by this comment and formed the “New Group.” This group rebelled against the traditional impressionists, hosting its inaugural show the day before the Phillips Mill Exhibition on May 16, 1930.

Other important modernist painters to later settle in the area after the initial arrivals were Josef Zenk (1904–2000), Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt (1878–1955), Swiss–born Joseph Meierhans (1890–1980), Clarence Carter (1904–2000), and Richard Peter Hoffman (1911–1997).

These ten women artists consisted of Fern Coppedge (1883–1951) and Mary Elizabeth Price (1877–1965) from New Hope, as well as Nancy Maybin Ferguson (1869–1967), Emma Fordyce MacRae (1887–1974), Eleanor Abrams (1885–1967), Constance Cochrane (1888–1962), and Theresa Bernstein (1890–2002).

According to the James A. Michener Art Museum’s senior curator Brian Peterson, “what most characterized Pennsylvania impressionism was not a single, unified style but rather the emergence of many mature, distinctive voices: Daniel Garber's luminous, poetic renditions of the Delaware River; Fern Coppedge's colorful village scenes; Robert Spencer's lyrical views of mills and tenements; John Folinsbee's moody, expressionistic snowscapes; and William L. Lathrop's deeply felt, evocative Bucks County vistas."

Art historian Thomas C. Folk defines the movement as the Late Pennsylvania School, those artists that "came to prominence in Bucks County after 1915 or after the Armory Show and the Panama–Pacific International Exposition."