Benson in bloom: a new look at Summer

Magazine Antiques, April, 2006 by Trevor Fairbrother

Realism, illustration, and artifice all have a hand in Benson's Summer. There can be no doubt that the picture captured what the artist experienced at Wooster Farm. But it is also certain that Benson took liberties when producing such paintings. His daughter Eleanor recalled: "Papa would often have us put on our best white dresses and then ask us to sit in the grass or play in the woods. We thought it was so silly and the maids made such a fuss when they saw the clothes afterwards." (16) She also knew that her father painted through rose-tinted glasses: "He always made us far more beautiful than we were." (17) Benson's main concern was to ensure that Summer achieved the status of a bankable work of art. Nonetheless, his picture may harbor an oblique sermon invoking purity, ethnic homogeneity, and distinguished New England ancestry. Benson himself was a striking man, a scion of a prosperous Salem mercantile family. The passport issued to him when he was twenty-one records that he was six feet three inches tall with dark brown hair, a light complexion, blue eyes, a medium forehead and mouth, an oval face and chin, and a regular nose. (18)

Benson's engagement in 1885 to Ellen Perry Peirson, the best friend of his older sister Georgiana, lasted three years, until it was clear that his work as an artist and teacher could support them suitably. He maintained a business-like approach to his career and was very wealthy by the 1920s. (19)

When the American impressionists were "rediscovered" around 1970, Newsweek's critic cautioned that the homemade variety was sweeter than the original French form: "What we see [in Benson's lovely Summer] is not unvarnished nature, seen in an instant, but a carefully arranged group of perfect maidens, movie stars all, not a touch of realism." (20) This line of thought, committed to removing the genteel mask from Benson's art, makes a bold reentry in a recent essay by William H. Truettner and Thomas Andrew Denenberg. These curators interpret Summer as a contribution to a WASP crusade that sought to make "Old New England" the official face of the historic United States. They argue that Benson gave North Haven, Maine, "the air of a Puritan Cap d'Antibes," and Summer "especially equates class and racial purity, with Anglo-Saxon bloodlines in danger of being thinned by waves of immigration." (21)

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The female figure looking out to sea had long been a motif in Benson's work. In After the Storm (Fig. 9), completed while the artist was studying in France, he painted a Breton peasant woman and child anxiously awaiting a fisherman's return. Isolated heroic figures of this sort abound in the work of Jean Francois Millet (1814-1875). Even before traveling to France, Benson would have experienced the essence of that celebrated French artist's work while studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he had access to collections that were rich in works by Millet.

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Benson soon stopped producing pictures that were as dramatically anecdotal as After the Storm. Nonetheless he often invoked the visual poetry of a woman on the shore and the graphic impact of a profiled head combined with a hand-on-hip stance. (22)