Toward Mrs. Driscoll's

Edwin Dickinson painted his spontaneous landscapes outdoors in a single sitting lasting from two to four hours. The method of completing a painting in just one session is called premier coup, or "first strike." Pioneered by French artists in the late 19th century, the technique was passed on to Dickinson by his teacher William Merritt Chase, who instructed his students to paint directly from nature. Dickinson, however, pushed the premier coup beyond the Impressionism of Chase. Here, the vigorous brushwork and abstract forms become a record of Dickinson's experience with nature. Dickinson was among the more intuitive practitioners of early American Modernism. The immediacy of Dickinson's painting, with its gestural brushwork, was embraced in the 1950s by Abstract Expressionists, with whom he exhibited.