The Puff of Smoke

Gifford Beals The Puff of Smoke from 1912 captures the dramatic moment when a steam locomotive emits a plume of smoke against a bright sky, combining the American Impressionist concern with atmospheric effects with the Ashcan Schools interest in the modern industrial landscape. Beal, the younger brother of the painter Reynolds Beal and a student of William Merritt Chase, developed a style that blended the high-keyed palette and broken brushwork of Impressionism with the everyday subject matter characteristic of the Ashcan painters. The puff of smoke itself is the star of the painting, a billowing white cloud that rises from the locomotive and catches the sunlight in a way that transforms a byproduct of industrial combustion into a phenomenon of atmospheric beauty. Beal renders the smoke with the same attention to color and light that his Impressionist predecessors brought to clouds and water, suggesting that the industrial landscape could provide subjects as pictorially rich as the rural scenes that dominated American Impressionist painting. The composition is organized around the diagonal of the train tracks and the vertical thrust of the smoke, creating a dynamic X-shaped structure that gives the painting an energy appropriate to its subject. Created in 1912, when the Ashcan School was at the height of its influence and American Impressionism was still the dominant style in academic circles, The Puff of Smoke negotiates a middle ground between the two movements, bringing the Ashcan interest in contemporary life to the Impressionist concern with light and atmosphere.

Beals paintings of trains and industrial subjects represent an important bridge between American Impressionism and the Ashcan School, demonstrating that the two movements were not opposed but complementary approaches to the modern American landscape. His work influenced the development of American industrial landscape painting that extended through Charles Sheeler to the Precisionist tradition.

An American Impressionist painting by Beal of a steam locomotives smoke plume, combining Ashcan interest in industrial subjects with Impressionist attention to atmospheric light effects, negotiating the boundary between the two dominant movements of early 20th-century American painting.