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Too often the story went that a young woman with artistic promise would marry then disappear from the world, picking up the brush only at distant intervals. When Harriet Randall Lumis married architect Fred Lumis in 1892, though, it was just the beginning of her career. The couple settled in Springfield, MA in 1893. The western Massachusetts terrain, with its rolling hills and fleeting seasons, was ideal for an artist who, after an initial Tonalist phase, let the thicker vibrancy of Impressionism sweep into her style and take hold. It would be hard to tell from Lumis’s work — fields and rivers and trees, with hardly a trace of people — that the city of Springfield’s population was climbing in a tall spike that only leveled out at 150,000 around 1930. One of the things that was bringing them there? The nascent automobile industry. The first gas-powered car debuted in Springfield the same year the Lumises moved there; the first modern fire engine was made there in 1905 by the Knox Automobile Company (whose slogan was "The Car That Never Drinks"); in 1921, when Rolls Royce had to pick a US city to address backlog issues in their manufacturing, they chose Springfield. The future was arriving, and fast (well, maybe at a maximum of 30MPH). Impressionism has a rich history of addressing the excitement, confusion, and anxiety around technological shifts and advances. In Europe, electricity, the steam engine, and the standardization of time all became subjects of the burgeoning Impressionist movement, so to see the fine gestural remnant of the wheel mark gliding across Lumis’s canvas in Stream Crossing comes as no particular shock. While many images of fording streams and rivers show the event itself, Lumis only gives us the moment after, the vehicle already rushed out of frame. There is a serenity to the scene, but the encroachment is etched as if to remind that change (in our relationships to time, to the land) may come subtly, creeping in at the edges, faster than you’re able to spot it.
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