Ladies in a Garden, John Singer Sargent, 1910 / Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
For more than 100 years, Americans have been drawn to Tuscany and its villas. Edith Wharton enthused about “Italian garden-magic”; historian Bernard Berenson created the ideal Renaissance garden at Villa I Tatti; and countless Americans rented or bought villas dotting the hills overlooking Florence. “Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists” at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi (through July 15) invites visitors to discover Florence through the eyes of the painters, like John Singer Sargent and James Abbot McNeill Whistler, who flocked to the city at the end of the 19th century. Not only does the exhibition show the impact of the landscape on the artists, it also reveals the lasting effect they had on Florence’s cosmopolitan cultural life. palazzostrozzi.org.
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