Benson in bloom: a new look at Summer

Magazine Antiques, April, 2006 by Trevor Fairbrother

Benson probably relied on the photographs shown in Figures 4a-d to produce several other paintings. The artist enjoyed photography, and probably took these photographs himself. Sunlight (Fig. 6), an informal portrait of his daughter Eleanor, recalls Figure 4a. In Summer of about 1909 (collection of Marie and Hugh Halff) recalls Figure 4c; and Margaret ("Gretchen") Strong, also of about 1909 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.), echoes Figure 4b. (7) Scholars have not been able to document the chronological sequence of this group of paintings. In 1988 Sheila Dugan surmised that the smaller works served as studies for Summer; the following year Faith Andrews Bedford, the artist's great-granddaughter, suggested that Summer came first and the paintings with just one or two figures were by-products. (8) One thing is certain: Benson liked to reuse a figure or a section of one picture in a new composition, and he occasionally painted variations of a given work. (9) In the absence of a photograph that shows all four young women grouped according to the composition of Summer, one wonders if Benson began the painting with three sitting figures, as they appear in Figure 4d, and then decided to add the sea watcher.

The early histories of Summer and Sunlight are curious. The catalogue for an exhibition in Chicago in 1910 illustrated Summer and listed Isaac C. Bates as the owner. (10) The John Herron Art Institute (now the Indianapolis Art Museum) purchased Sunlight in 1911, but the previous year the picture had been exhibited twice as Sunlight Study. (11) It seems that Benson was rather lax about titles, and cared most that they be brief and winning. Bates loaned a painting entitled Sunlight to an exhibition in Boston in 1910, and this was probably the painting that is now known as Summer. (12)

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Benson's tremendous success at the dawn of the twentieth century derived from his combination of impressionist mannerisms with subject matter that the arbiters of mainstream American taste deemed heartwarming. Love of his family and delight in the summers they shared in Maine gave him the edge he needed to capture attention in exhibitions and the press. Two informal pictures of his children illustrated "Vacation Days," the article on Benson that St. Nicholas published in 1909. The magazine's frontispiece was Calm Morning, painted in 1904 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), a luminous image of Eleanor, George, and Elisabeth in a white dory. (13) The picture accompanying the text was Portrait of My Daughters (Fig. 7), an impressionist hymn to "best behavior" in which Elisabeth, Sylvia, and Eleanor sit together at Wooster Farm. The Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts purchased Portrait of My Daughters early in 1908 and lent it that spring to the Ten's annual exhibition in New York. The picture drew much critical acclaim, including this notice in International Studio:

 The joyousness of this performance was contagious, the sparkling pigment, the beautiful young women, the sense of the open and the lively color scheme contributing to make a most agreeable result. And Mr. Benson knows well his metier, with certainty and capacity, securing his results with a freedom of touch, a healthiness of method that cannot be over-commended. (14) 

Charles Caffin's 1909 essay on Benson argued that his art distilled something of the newness of modern America, whose people shared "a common belief in the present and future of their country and themselves." Characterizing Benson as a "New-Englander," Caffin thought it "natural" that he derived his modern type of American womanhood from "the New England strain." He felt that Benson's female type "has something of the character of a fine blooded racehorse, long in its lines, clean cut, spare of flesh, the bone and muscle felt beneath it, movement throughout accentuated--unmistakable signs of pedigree." According to Caffin, "Our [present-day American] ideal is the art of better and happier living, with the help of science and through the moral desire of a strong breed of men and women." He also maintained that Benson's urge to dignify "the grace and reserve of womanhood" was a welcome rejoinder to the vulgar facade of America's big cities, which harbored "extravagant and conscienceless living." (15) Caffin's language was cautious, but implications were laid out: Benson presents a better sort of woman and the sunny consequences of her prosperousness. By picturing those who enjoyed a modern American dream, Benson was offering a distraction from the ills of urban poverty, child labor, and societal ills caused by political corruption. That standpoint, which Caffin and Benson shared, had come under attack in 1908, when a group of artists calling themselves the Eight exhibited together in New York. Robert Henri (1865-1929), their eloquent, reform-minded spokesman, inspired artists to challenge genteel taste by depicting prosaic street scenes. Henri's unsentimental realism--a kind of reportorial and expressive figurative painting that came to be scornfully labeled the Ashcan school--blossomed in opposition to the standard brand of impressionism that made Benson's art so well-liked.