Late 19th Century Scenes of Summer

Paintings by Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins

Jun 21, 2009

Three paintings by American-born artists Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins captured new views of the Good Old Summertime.

Summer in the late 19th century was a season of warmer temperatures without the relief of air conditioning, swimming pools or even decent refrigeration, as well as still-restrictive dress codes for both men and women. The same simple pleasures which enhance the season today were no doubt even more enjoyable then, with a visit to the nearest beach, lake or river generally high on the list of desired outings.

Numerous paintings of the era show beachscapes, river scenes or gently drifting boats, but in three particularly distinctive works, artists Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins offered unique perspectives of these fleeting glimpses of summer.

Winslow Homer’s Summer Night

Born in Boston, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was a primarily self-trained artist who first proved his mettle during the American Civil War, producing illustrations of combat and daily life among soldiers. The independent-minded Homer would also become known for his sea scenes and landscapes, often using unusual angles or other distinctive qualities to distinguish his work from similarly-themed efforts.

Homer’s 1890 dreamlike and captivating painting Summer Night shows two women dancing on the beach in the moonlight. Shadows darken the shoreline, while the women themselves are pale and even spectral, clinging to each other with a strange desperation. The vaguely surreal scene can suggest perhaps just two women overwhelmed by a warm, heady night and the nearby surging of waves, or it might even represent a mystical sighting of ghosts — drowned or shipwrecked souls who emerge only on certain summer evenings, yet then disappear with the tide.

Mary Cassatt’s Summertime

Though Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was born near Pittsburgh, she eventually made her way to Europe and was associated with the French Impressionists for most of her creative life. Cassatt, like her fellow Impressionists Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, would come under the spell of Japanese art during the latter decades of the 19th century and used key principles of Japanese composition and color in her own work.

In 1890, Cassatt made several visits to a show of Japanese prints at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts, including one trip with Edgar Degas, with whom Cassatt shared an interesting artistic friendship. Cassatt’s output following this visit showed a renewed Japonisme focus, and her 1894 painting Summertime is a lovely example of such influence.

In Summertime, a woman and young girl float smoothly along in a rowboat flanked by ducks. The perspective of the scene is cropped to heighten the woman and child, and the boat beneath them is suggested by a simple series of brushstrokes. The colors used are soft and muted but not dull, while the bobbing waves and swimming ducks are finely depicted and correlate to the love of nature in traditional Japanese art.

Thomas Eakins’ The Swimming Hole

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was a Philadelphia-based artist with an intense desire for truth and freedom of expression. Eakins studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later became Director of the institution, educating such artists as Henry Ossawa Tanner and Thomas Anschutz. Eakins’ main goal was to push his students to achieve the best work possible, with this objective sometimes resulting in rather unorthodox teaching methods.

A passionate realist, Eakins further insisted on use of the full nude figure in Life Drawing classes for male and female students. Eakins did not believe that women should be shielded from nudity or treated as creatures with delicate sensibilities. Eakins’ stance resulted in his termination from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886, and the remainder of his career would be shadowed by this incident, along with various innuendos and general censure from more conservative members of the art community.

Eakins’ 1885 The Swimming Hole is an unabashed early use of the male nude in American art. In the painting, a group of young, athletic men go skinny-dipping in broad daylight to escape the heat. Though frontal exposure is minimal, Eakins nonetheless showed varying degrees of extraordinarily ordinary nakedness — without disguising the scene within a pseudo-classical or coy genre backdrop.

Not surprisingly, Eakins was a fan of the free-spirited and earthy poet Walt Whitman, whose "Twenty-Eight Naked Men" portion of Whitman’s 1855 Song of Myself seems to underlie The Swimming Hole. Eakins’ own art students posed for preliminary photos for The Swimming Hole, and just to practice what he preached, Eakins even included himself among the final painting's proudly naked bunch.

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