At leisure
American Impressionism and Realism: Virtual tour
Childe Hassam 1859–1935 | Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain, 1918 1918 | Oil on canvas | 91.4 x 72.1cm (36 x 28?in.) | Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot(1876–1967), 1967 | 67.187.127 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Childe Hassam 1859–1935 | Peach blossoms – Villiers-le-Bel c. | Oil on canvas | 54.6 x 46cm (21? x18?in.) | Gift of Mrs J Augustus Barnard,1979 | 1979.490.9 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
J Alden Weir 1852–1919 | The factory village 1897 Oil on canvas | 73.7 x 96.6cm (29 x 38in.) | Gift of Cora Weir Burlingham, 1979, and Purchase, Marguerite and Frank Cosgrove Jr Fund, 1998 | 1979.487 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
George Bellows 1882–1925 | Tennis at Newport 1919 | Oil on canvas | 101.6 x 109.9cm (40 x43?in.) | Bequest of Miss Adelaide Miltonde Groot (1876–1967), 1967 | 67.187.121 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
John Singer Sargent 1856–1925 | Mr and Mrs IN Phelps Stokes 1897 | Oil on canvas | 214 x 101cm (84? x 39?in.) | Bequest of Edith Minturn Phelps Stokes (Mrs IN), 1938 | 38.104 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Winslow Homer 1836–1910 | Northeaster 1895 | Oil on canvas | 87.6 x 127cm (34? x 50in.) | Gift of George A Hearn, 1910 | 10.64.5 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York
Cecilia Beaux 1855–1942 | Ernesta (Child with nurse) 1894 | Oil on canvas | 128.3 x 96.8cm (50? x38?in.) | Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, 1965 |65.49 | Collection: The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, New York
Mary Cassatt 1844–1926 | The cup of tea c.1880–81 | Oil on canvas | 92.4 x 65.4cm (36? x25?in.) | From the Collection of JamesStillman, Gift of Dr Ernest G Stillman, 1922 | 22.16.17 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Like their French counterparts, the American Impressionists were drawn to country retreats and suburban resorts whose very creation marked the era’s shift from a rural to an urban existence. These sites afforded opportunities for leisure and recreation, hallmarks of late nineteenth-century life generated and necessitated by industrialisation and urbanisation. The American Impressionists preferred seaside communities and inland villages in New England or on Long Island, New York. The Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire, Cornish in New Hampshire, Gloucester on the Massachusetts coast, and Shinnecock and East Hampton on Long Island are as closely identified with the leading American Impressionists as Deauville, Argenteuil and Giverny are with their French counterparts.
Although the American Realists were oriented toward urban subjects and social issues, they did visit places in the countryside. Committed to recording the lives of the working classes, they preferred the rowdy resorts accessible to less affluent city dwellers – Coney Island and Bellport on Long Island, for example – and strayed only occasionally to more refined retreats, such as Newport, Rhode Island and Gloucester. Like the American Impressionists, the Realists portrayed their experiences in a favourable light. Highlighting sightseers and picnickers, they tempered noisy, crowded and dirty surroundings to evoke leisure and recreation. They also masked the fact that the vacationers they depicted enjoyed only brief respite from toil, perhaps no more than a single day off work.
Australia
Australians enjoy an enduring love affair with spending the day at the beach. In the late nineteenth century, many artists found inspiration by the sea at the new social sites at Coogee and Manly in Sydney, and Mentone and other beaches on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. Improved rail, road and ferry transport brought the beach within easy reach of the city dwellers who would feature in the artists’ paintings.
This newly discovered subject was matched by the artists’ deployment of the latest ideas in painting. Tom Roberts’s Holiday sketch at Coogee is a plein-airist expression of his excitement at the intensity of Sydney’s light and colour. Charles Conder’s painting of the beach at Mentone captures members of a sophisticated, leisured class enjoying the pleasures of the seaside, and its composition indicates the influences of Japanese art and of James McNeill Whistler – who used a bridge motif to structure several of his paintings – as well as that of Conder’s friend, Tom Roberts.
The liveliness and popularity of bathing on Australian beaches continued to attract artists in the early twentieth century. The English-born Ethel Carrick Fox’s Impressionist crowd scene captures sea bathers at Manly, which in 1903 became one of the earliest beaches to allow daytime bathing, and Roy de Maistre experimented with Post-Impressionist techniques to depict well-dressed middle-class ladies holding Japanese umbrellas, almost 30 years later than Conder’s model.
From formal dresses to bathing suits, artists have continued to follow the crowds and document a much-loved and ongoing scene of Australian life – a day of leisure at the beach.
Maurice Prendergast
1858–1924
Beach no.3 c.1913
Oil on canvas
Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967
Acc. 67.187.135
Prendergast‘s park and beach scenes of the 1890s and 1900s are dominated by a bright, lively palette and an attention to sunlight and its effects that could be identified as Impressionist. He explored themes of leisure and urban recreation in his paintings – subjects that also appeared in the works of the Realists. In addition, in around 1910 his style increasingly displayed inflections of European Modernism. Beach no.3 reflects the growinginfluence of French painters Henri Matisse and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes on Prendergast’s work. In this canvas, the artist puts aside his earlier interest in depicting visual reality in favour of conveying a more fantastical or imagined dimension. Here, he uses neither linear nor atmospheric perspective, but employs tiered bands to create a shallow, frieze-like space for his characters.
William Merritt Chase
1849–1916
At the seaside c.1892
Oil on canvas
Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967
Acc. 67.187.123
As industrialisation increased demand for leisure, many New Yorkers visited coastal communities on Long Island such as the town of Southampton, east of the city. William Merritt Chase was persuaded by one of Southampton’s summer residents to conduct a summer art school at Shinnecock Hills, just west of Southampton. Chase began giving summer classes in 1891 and the region’s brilliant light and proximity to the sea inspired him to produce numerous landscapes. At the seaside is a prime example, depicting a group of beachgoers – likely his family members or close friends. Chase adopts the light, airy palette of the French Impressionists in order to suggest sunlight, while also evoking aspects of Japanese art. The high horizon and the flattening of sea, sky and sand into geometric forms is derived from Japanese prints.
William Glackens
1870–1938Crowd at the seashore c.1910
Oil on canvas
Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967
Acc. 67.187.126
While wealthy New Yorkers sought escape from the city’s summer heat to fashionable resorts along the coasts of New England and Long Island, the majority took day trips to nearby beaches and amusement parks. Glackens was known to visit Coney Island, a popular recreation area on the southern edge of Brooklyn, and Crowd at the seashore may depict the throngs who gathered there. His vibrant colour and vigorous brushwork capture a local beach abuzz with New York City’s diverse summer revellers. Glackens was a friend and advisor to the notable American collector Albert C Barnes and shared Barnes’s taste for the works of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose style is evident here and in Glackens’s paintings after about 1910.
![Gifford Beal 1879–1956 The Albany boat 1915 Oil on canvas / 92.4 x 153cm (36⅜ x 60¼in.) / George A Hearn Fund, 1917 / 17.48.1 Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Estate of [Gifford Beal]](/__data/assets/image/0010/73837/2009.02_052.jpg "The Albany boat 1915")
Gifford Beal
1879–1956
The Albany boat 1915
Oil on canvas
George A Hearn Fund, 1917
Acc. 17.48.1
In the early twentieth century, steamboat excursions along the Hudson River were a well-established form of popular recreation. In The Albany boat, Beal depicts one of these vessels stopping at the town of Newburgh, about midway between Manhattan and Albany, the state capital. Between 1901 and 1920, he spent most summers at his parents’ Newburgh home, from where he would explore the river valley and record its striking scenery. In contrast to the mid nineteenth-century Hudson River School who produced grandiose views of the unspoiled wilderness in the region, Beal is celebrating it as a site of leisure and retreat from urban life while maintaining an impression of the region’s beauty.
George Bellows
1882–1925
Tennis at Newport 1919
Oil on canvas
Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967
Acc. 67.187.121
Bellows established a reputation for his scenes of urban life, sports and leisure, as well as for his portraits of his family. In June 1919, he and his family summered in Middletown, Rhode Island, a town adjacent to the much more fashionable resort of Newport. In August of that year, Bellows visited the Newport Casino, which had reinstituted its dances and tennis tournaments following their suspension during the war. In Tennis at Newport, Bellows, an avid sports enthusiast, does not record the professional competition he came to see, but instead portrays a casual doubles game played by casino visitors and captures the relaxed demeanor of the spectators, who sit or stroll in clusters on the lawn.
Charles Conder
1868–1909
A holiday at Mentone 1888
Oil on canvas
South Australian Government Grant with the assistance
of Bond Corporation Holdings Limited through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation to mark the Gallery’s Centenary 1981
Collection: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
One of the first works Conder painted after arriving in Melbourne from Sydney, A holiday at Mentone is considered such a singularly Australian work that in 1988 it was used on the cover of the ‘Creating Australia’ exhibition catalogue during the bicentennial year of European settlement.
Painted in the bright midday light of spring, this canvas captures a beachside suburb near Melbourne, made accessible by the recently established train line. Melbourne was in the throes of a land boom, and when the real estate speculator Matthew Davies advertised land in the suburb, he dubbed Mentone ‘the Riviera of the South’. Conder’s composition is carefully staffed with fashionably dressed people, and art historian Ann Galbally has observed the implied comment on a provocative social situation in this painting: at that time, under the Vagrant Act, men were prohibited from bathing in the open between 8.00am and 7.00pm. In a society in which some activities were still strictly segregated, mixed gatherings were banned at Mentone when either sex was swimming. This tableau vivant-like composition is an example of Conder’s choreography of elements and visual puns – the ‘new woman’ is reading the cheeky pink-covered radical Sydney magazine Bulletin; a man is lying asleep on the sand, his copy of the Bulletin against his legs. The standing urban flaneur gazes nowhere in particular.
