While in Europe, many of these artists lived communally in Giverny, France. Alongside Monet, they worked en plein air to capture the immediate effects of light in nature. It is remembered that Monet told Lilla Cabot Perry that her “first impression should go onto the canvas, as it is the truest and most pure expression.” Upon the American artists’ repatriation, they brought with them works by their European teachers and paved the way for these avant-garde styles in the domestic art market. Due to the blatant rejection of Realism’s classical rules, the modernism of these works was unsuccessful, but shortly, wealthy art patrons began to see the light.

Like their European counterparts, the American painters chose pastoral or genre subjects: people picnicking in the park, a woman bathing by the water’s edge, blossoming boughs in an old orchard. Of course, the real subject in all of these works is light and its power to move us. John Leslie Breck’s impression of a wave crashing upon a craggy rock and Colin Campbell Cooper’s shady depiction of the Gate of the Maharaja’s Palace exemplify Monet’s instructions to Perry -- to preserve in paint the most fleeting sensations and effects and thereby to find truth.