French lessons

Twilight in Paris. A young couple strolls through the park. His collar is loosened; he smokes a cigarette; she carries a red fan that matches the splash of flowers in the distance. The air is opalescent and soft. A man reads his newspaper in the distance, and a pool catches the yellow moon's diamond-bright reflections.

John Singer Sargent painted ``In the Luxembourg Gardens" in 1879, and the lush image still captures a romantic dream Americans have of the City of Light . The painting is the centerpiece of the first gallery of ``Americans in Paris, 1860- 1900," the Museum of Fine Arts' showcase exhibition for the summer.

Yet as showcases go, ``Americans in Paris" does not quite dazzle. Despite the presence of legendary paintings by Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler and a stunning array of canvases by Mary Cassatt, the show adds up to a stolid, substantive social history, mostly supported with paintings by deft but second-tier artists. It culminates, logically and quietly, with the flowering of American Impressionism -- a more calculated and less daring movement than its French forebear. It's like hoping for fireworks on the Fourth of July and being handed a sparkler.

Curators Erica E. Hirshler of the MFA, Kathleen Adler (of the National Gallery, London, where ``Americans in Paris" opened last February) , and H. Barbara Weinberg (of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it will go in the fall) draw a vivid picture of late 19th-century Paris, and its attraction to American painters. It was the capital of the Western art world. Americans flocked there to study, exhibit in the competitive annual Paris Salon, and make their name.

The show unfurls thematically. First, with scenes of the city itself, such as ``In the Luxembourg Gardens." Childe Hassam's vaguely stiff ``At the Florist" (1889) portrays a middle-class woman and her maid on a shining sidewalk before an array of blossoms funneled in white paper. Charles Courtney Curran's ``Afternoon in the Cluny Garden, Paris" (1889) is slight, a strange hybrid of the tightly painted academic technique with the Impressionist topic of two women reading in the sun-splashed park.

Other themes include studio interiors (there's an oddly stuffy Winslow Homer scene of a chamber music concert), and two artist types: the bohemian, exemplified by Thomas Hovenden's ``Self Portrait of the Artist in His Studio" (1875), sprawling back from his easel, a violin in hand, and the ``flaneur," or dandy. Most of these are painted conservatively, with polish and attention to volume but little flair.

The delightfully confrontational 1885 self-portrait by Bostonian Ellen Day Hale was painted in the same style, but it adds a tart twist as the artist takes on the traditional pose of a man. Hale was not an aberration -- a third of American artists studying in Paris at the time were women.

The magnets for ``Americans in Paris" are iconic: Sargent's ``Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau)" (1884), and Whistler's ``Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother" (1871), widely known as ``Whistler's Mother." Each, paired with another painting by the same artist, explores feminine identity.

The notorious ``Madame X" (1884), both sultry and chilly, hangs beside a canvas Sargent originally intended as its counterpoint, ``Mrs. Henry White (Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford)" (1883). The artist showed both at the 1884 Salon. The bland Mrs. White is less interesting than her white gown, executed with Sargent's luminous flourishes.

``Madame X," meanwhile, caused a scandal -- perhaps because, with the shoulder strap of her black dress dangling, Sargent portrayed her as frankly erotic, though remote. Up to that point, society ladies had not been eroticized. Sargent, stunned by the enraged response, fled Paris and repainted the lady's strap.

It's historically significant to show these paintings together, but the pairing fizzles. The pallid Mrs. White can't match Madame Gautreau's searing presence.

By contrast, the two Whistlers electrify the gallery with their charged exchange. ``Whistler's Mother" hangs smartly across from his ``Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl" (1862). The portrait of the artist's lover was rejected by the Salon and met, like ``Madame X," with outcry in the Salon des Refuses, where many Salon rejects were shown.

For Whistler, the paintings were more about composition and paint application than personality -- hence the titles (he appended ``Portrait of the Artist's Mother" after criticism for calling his dear old mum an ``arrangement"). ``The White Girl" has a rough surface; ghostly as she is, she has more heft and bristle than ``Whistler's Mother," which is painted elegantly in dark, thin washes. Like Sargent's Mrs. White, this girl looks vacant, but hauntingly so. She shows the ravaged grief of youth; the artist's mother, in her mourning clothes, is more contained but still grieving.

Cassatt has 14 works in ``Americans in Paris." She was the only American invited to exhibit with the Impressionists, in a show they established apart from the Salon. Her work, unlike that of the Monet wannabes on view such as Willard Metcalf and John Leslie Breck , hums with originality and intelligence.

She submitted ``Little Girl in a Blue Armchair" (187 8) to the American section of the 1878 Exposition Universelle, but it was rejected, perhaps because of its rough finish, and included in the fourth Impressionist exhibit the following year. A young girl lies back on a vibrant blue chair, caught up in her own dreams. The casual pose, the fluid brushwork, and the brilliant color were hallmarks of Impressionism. The clarity of the girl's personality, the inner life expressed by her posture and expression, are hallmarks of Cassatt.

The MFA's own jewel, Sargent's ``The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" (1882), hangs near many of the Cassatts. It's been cleaned, and an informal array of vases on the mantel now appears in the dark background; it echoes both the odd placement of the four girls and the two oversize vases in the scene. These latter vases stand in the gallery, flanking the painting.

``Americans in Paris" features nearly 100 paintings, and many of them effectively illustrate the era. But while the best of the show is captivating, the bulk of the exhibit isn't particularly great art. Sargent falls flat (as he did portraying Mrs. White) with ``Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood" (1885). More interesting as a historic document than as a painting, it looks cursory and unfinished.

Eventually, the Americans came home, and applied what they learned in France with diligence. They parlayed the academic attention to volume and portraiture, along with the Impressionists' fascination with social scenes, landscape, and light and loose brushwork, into their own style. Dennis Miller Bunker is the best of the lot in the last gallery; his ``Chrysanthemums" (1888) (bought by Isabella Stewart Gardner), uses space and perspective to thrust a bank of flowers toward the viewer.

But artists such as Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson crafted carefully drawn young lovelies surrounded by fluttering vistas of color and light. What had been maverick in France became a packaged, easy sell. And that's quintessentially American.