SLAM presents first exhibition devoted to landscapes by women Impressionists

ST. LOUIS, May 19, 2026—The Saint Louis Art Museum this fall will present “Women Impressionists and the Land,” the first exhibition to focus on landscapes as a distinct body of work essential for understanding the women artists of the Impressionism movement.

Featuring more than 70 works—including paintings, works on paper and ceramics—from prestigious international and national museum collections, as well as many private collections, the exhibition makes the case that landscape painting was central to the practice of the women Impressionists and reflective of their assertions of independence at a time when women’s activities outside the home were often constrained. The SLAM-organized exhibition opens Oct. 17 and runs through Jan. 10, 2027.

“Women Impressionists and the Land” centers primarily on the three leading women Impressionists who showed at the Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886—Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond. Also included are works by Edma Morisot-Pontillon (Berthe’s sister), Blanche Hoschedé-Monet (stepdaughter and daughter-in-law of Claude Monet), Louise Abbéma, Elodie La Villette and Rosa Bonheur. The exhibition also showcases a number of newly discovered works by Morisot and Bracquemond that will be on display to the public for the first time.

“Landscape painting was central to the practice of the women Impressionists,” said exhibition curator Simon Kelly, SLAM’s modern and contemporary art curator. “These artists worked outdoors, traveled widely and developed some of the most innovative approaches to capturing the land in the entire Impressionist movement. Yet that contribution has remained largely in the shadow of their figurative paintings and domestic interiors, and of the landscapes made by their famous male counterparts. This exhibition reclaims these landscapes as a body of work that is radical, ecologically attuned and overdue for serious attention.”

The exhibition will unfold across seven galleries. The first, “The Salon in the 1860s: Bonheur and the Morisot Sisters,” will orient visitors in women’s landscape practice in mid-19th-century France, with works by Rosa Bonheur alongside early paintings by Morisot and her sister Morisot-Pontillon. Included here are several newly discovered canvases by the Morisot sisters on public view for the first time. The next gallery, “Against the Salon: Morisot’s Radicalism,” will chart the shift Morisot made from traditional Salon conventions to the Impressionist exhibitions of the 1870s and 1880s—underscoring her position as the movement’s preeminent female landscape painter.

The third gallery will focus on Bracquemond, whose landscape practice has only recently begun to receive sustained critical attention. Two newly discovered paintings by Bracquemond, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, will be exhibited for the first time. The fourth gallery, “Between Gardens and Parks,” will explore the artists’ deep investment in cultivated nature and in particular Morisot’s sustained engagement with the park of the Bois de Boulogne through paintings and a series of drypoints. Also included is Louise Abbéma’s monumental depiction of herself and her lover, the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, on a lake in the park.

The fifth gallery, titled “Painting Rural Agriculture,” will bring together images of rural labor and the working landscape, examining the ways both artists depicted the agricultural terrain around Bougival, Mézy and Giverny. The next section, “Networks in the 1890s,” will trace the evolution of Morisot’s late style and the developing network between Morisot, Cassatt and Blanche Hoschédé-Monet, who emerged as a plein-air painter in her own right. And the seventh and final gallery, “Cassatt at the Château de Beaufresne,” will focus on the last decades of Cassatt’s career and her deep attachment to the gardens and pond of her country estate north of Paris.

“Impressionism is one of the most-beloved chapters in the history of Western art, and yet this exhibition demonstrates how much of that story remains to be told,” said Min Jung Kim, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “This exhibition will assemble a remarkable group of works that, shown together, reposition these artists at the center of a movement that has too often been told predominantly through the achievements of their male peers. Featuring an array of important loans, ‘Women Impressionists and the Land’ reflects the beauty and creativity we so enjoy sharing with our audiences.”

“Women Impressionists and the Land” will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Holberton and Yale University Press, with eight essays by leading Impressionism scholars including Simon Kelly, Mary Morton, Nicole Georgopulos, Elizabeth Childs, Sylvie Patry, Galina Olmsted, Nicole Myers and Abigail Yoder.