Benson in bloom: a new look at Summer

Magazine Antiques, April, 2006 by Trevor Fairbrother

Winslow Homer, who was twenty-six years older than Benson, had already assimilated the solemn dignity and statuesque weight of Millet's peasants when developing his own mature style. The charm and fresh coloring of Homer's paintings, especially the pastoral subjects, probably influenced Benson's artistic view of New England. Homer made several groups of pictures of women on hilltops, and the examples with the most affinities to Benson's Summer show shepherdesses. Homer's Fresh Air (Fig. 10) contains many of the details and effects that Benson employed later: a bright sky alive with clouds; a contemplative subject entranced by a vista; a shadowed face silhouetted against the sky; a vivifying sense of sunshine and brisk air.

Benson, like Homer, had a good instinct for giving a picture just enough of a narrative hook while keeping the forms and the composition spare. Homer, of course, had perfected those skills during his eighteen years as an illustrator for magazines, sheet music, novels, and children's books.

Benson's Summer and the other reverent dreamlike pictures he painted as a Yankee impressionist can be usefully compared with an illustration that Charles Stanley Reinhart made in 1886 for the following passage in a novel by Charles Dudley Warner (Fig. 8). The narrator is describing the people who enjoy a newly built esplanade overlooking the bay at Plymouth, Massachusetts:

 It was lovely in the after-glow and at moonrise. Staid citizens with their families occupied the benches, groups were chatting under the spreading linden-tree at the north entrance, and young maidens in white muslin promenaded, looking seaward, as was the wont of Puritan maidens, watching a receding or a coming Mayflower.... It was high tide, and all the bay was silvery with a tinge of color from the glowing sky. The long, curved sand-spit--which was heavily wooded when the Pilgrims landed--was silvery also, and upon its northern tip glowed the white sparkle in the lighthouse like the evening-star. (23) 

Benson generalized the subjects of Summer to such a degree that they could evoke the past, the present, and the future. They were first and foremost comely sirens of 1909; but they could also be throwbacks to the quainter chapters of New England's past and the future mothers of America's destiny.

The author wishes to thank the following for their generous help and advice: Faith Andrews Bedford, Helen Fisher, Anne Halpern, Nancy Allyn Jarzombek, Melissa R. Katz, Sarah Kelly, John T. Kirk, Karen Kramer, Andrew Martinez, Christine Michelini, Maureen O'Brien, Abbie Sprague, Harriet G. Warkel, and Bruce Weber.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

(1) Charles Henry Caffin, "The Art of Frank W. Benson," Harper's Monthly Magazine, vol. 119 (June 1909), pp. 109-110.

(2) M. W. F. [possibly Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)], "Vacation Days," St. Nicholas, vol. 36, no. 10 (August 1909), p. 883.

(3) Ibid. Benson first exhibited at the National Academy in New York City in 1889 where he won the Hallgarten Prize.