The two stars of “Painting the Beautiful: The Pennsylvainia Impressionist Landscape Tradition” at the Society of the Four Arts are unfortunately deceased, but their paintings are very much alive.

Their names are Edward Redfield and Daniel Garber, and their work, as well as the rest of the exhibit, derive from the collection of the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsyvlania.

There were many localized schools of Impressionism scattered throughout America, but the Pennsylvania group seems to have been a late-blooming adjunct of the Barbizon school - this is all plein air painting, with an emphasis on rural atmosphere and an implicit appreciation of traditional values.

Redfield in particular seems to have been heading that way from the beginning of his career. There’s a painting from 1898 called “Joinville Le Pont,” that’s all mist and gauze in the approved style of the day, but by mid-career - he was born in 1869 and died in 1965 - he had lost the fashionable fuzziness and gone specific in a big way, becoming particularly adept at combining disparate elements in one canvas.

Redfield’s “Lumberville in Winter” assembles snow, light, naked trees, scattered foliage, and dappled sunlight, which is not a combination you often get in painting, although it’s frequent in nature.

For the crusty Redfield, painting was as much an endurance contest as an artistic one. “I trained myself to [put] down what I saw in one day, sometimes eight hours or more,” he said. “I never painted over a canvas again. I think it ruins them. Either you’ve got it the first time or you haven’t.”

When Redfield couldn’t sell a painting, he lived off his outdoor expertise at fishing and hunting. Garber, on the other hand, taught for decades at the Pennsylvania Academy of of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and conservatively insisted on realism long after abstraction ruled the day.

Other featured artists are less distinctive, but work from the same palette, with an emphasis on grays and browns - the California Impressionists, among others, had a much brighter palette, with lots of ochre and orange. George Satter’s “Hillside Cottage,” has a little light emerging from the windows of the cottage seen in a distant nightime view, but there is no comforting Thomas Kinkade atmosphere; the mood is rather forbidding. Also on the bleak side is Harry Leith-Ross’ “New Hope Millworker’s Cottage,” which embodies some of the uneasy starkness of early Edward Hopper.

An exception to the mostly subdued colors is “After the Rain” by Rae Stone Bredin, which portrays a sun-dappled river and adjacent bank with a boy and a cart. It’s a purely pastoral scene that could have come from one of the less rigorous French Impressionists - one of the ones who wasn’t afraid of beauty.

There was a lot of the flinty New Englander in these midwestern artists - winter is frequently pictured, and the atmosphere is usually isolated and absent people. By the 1920s and ’30s, these regional impressionists must have struck the New York art scene as obsessively rural and retrograde; the abstractionists were devotees of the Big City and the machine age.

The work of the Pennsyvlania impressionists was rediscovered in the 1980s, and now we can observe it with the respect and affection its craftsmanship and homey, unexciting virtues deserve.