Paul Cornoyer was among America’s most advanced early proponents of impressionism, innovative among his colleagues for his application of the technique to bustling city scenes instead of sedate pastoral subjects. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and worked much of his young career there, apart from several years spent studying in Paris at the Academie Julien where he developed an expansive Barbizon technique. In the 1890s, William Merritt Chase—who himself had family ties to St. Louis—acquired some of Cornoyer’s works and encouraged him to move to New York. His work there over the next two decades marks his signature style: impressionistic renderings of public urban spaces celebrating the life of the city just as French Impressionism had celebrated the garden party in the previous century. He was elected to the National Academy in 1909, and enjoyed favorable reviews throughout the next decade. His works range in treatment from elegant Tonalism to brightly-hued impressionism, embracing a variety of atmospheric conditions through a variety of painterly techniques. Toward the end of his career, he moved to Massachusetts, where he worked and exhibited until his death in 1923. His oeuvre is a remarkably durable expression of American Impressionism’s elasticity, spanning the life and death of Ash Can urbanism while embracing modern life with a beauty matched perhaps by Childe Hassam’s.