Ebbing Tide, Version Two by Willard Leroy Metcalf, 1907. Oil on canvas, 26 x 29 inches. Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine.

The Peabody Essex Museum presents an ambitious exhibit of 82 works by artists who were drawn to the light and scenery of New England

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One ambitious exhibit has assembled the work of 82 of those artists, including Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Andrew Wyeth, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Lois Dodd and scores of other painters who drew inspiration from New England summers. Gathered from more than 50 institutions, galleries, artists and private collections across the country, the exhibit called Painting Summer in New England remains on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, through September 4.

Why summer?
“At first, the notion of a theme like ‘painting summer in New England’ almost seemed corny,” says guest curator Trevor Fairbrother of Brookline, Massachusetts. “But for those of us who live here, summer is not winter, which means a lot when you spend so much time waiting for it to come around again.”

While the work of such Boston School and regional artists as Sargent and Edmund Tarbell are a definite presence here, the exhibit aspires to be regional in subject rather than artist. “And we were fairly loose about what defined summer,” says Trevor. “Basically, a tree had to be green—and not red—and the seasonal duration of the works here actually runs from about April/May to September/October, much as we’d like our summers to do.”

Styles of paintings in the exhibit
Like New England, the exhibit is a study in contrasts, an array of painters, expression and imagery that ranges wide. Since New England and summer are narrower themes, Trevor aimed to broaden the scope of the show in terms of technique, style and chronology, with works that span a period from the 1850s through present day. “Of course, the surprise in that is, when is the last time you saw traditional works by Sargent and Wyeth and those of exuberantly abstract Hans Hofmann all in the same show?” Indeed, the scope of this show is so broad that Trevor acknowledges that, “while not wanting this to be too easy, we were sort of holding our breath about how this eccentric group of things would come together in a cohesive whole.”

Traditional realists are well-represented here, of course, with many of the picture-perfect bucolic or light-saturated images that so often represent New England. As for the work of Impressionists, the show’s hallmark is undoubtedly Summer, Frank Weston Benson’s painting (see top photo on this page) of elegant young women in summer white, also featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue.

“One reason I’m especially thrilled to include this piece is that even though Salem is where Benson was born and bred and this is a much-loved work, it’s never been shown here,” Trevor says. “It’s set in Maine on land that he owned near his summer house on North Haven Island and shows two of his daughters together with two local friends. The exhibit also features another really nice painting by Benson’s friend, Willard Metcalf, which will be hung in the same room. It’s a landscape of the exact same seaside view, which Metcalf once humorously described as ‘a painting of Frank Benson’s backyard.’”

While most traditional works tend to be romantic and idealized, the exhibit also strives for a balance that makes it “more than simply a happy, summery show,” says Trevor. “We have an image of a gloomy summer day, and one of a view after a hurricane that’s very wild looking by a New York painter named Paul Resika, who goes to Cape Cod every summer.

“The works get bigger and more expressive in the twentieth century, of course, and after the second World War, you get this explosion of style,” he notes. “Artists in that generation were very interested in large scale, whether abstract or not. The largest is a fairly recent work by Alex Katz that’s nearly 20 feet wide. Another piece by Tom Wesselmann, famous in pop art in the ‘60s, is Seascape, a painting whose surface, is, in part, a molded Plexiglas shape that curves out like a 3-D advertisement.”

Not every contemporary artist in the show tends toward the giant or abstract, however. “Another extreme are works by Helen Miranda Wilson, who does these very minutely finished works,” Trevor says. “One is a close-up of a bit of beach and the other a bit of lawn. They’re perhaps six-and-a-half- to eight-inches square and to look at them, you’d think she’s painted every single blade of grass or grain of sand.”

Although Trevor wrote his doctoral dissertation on Boston School artist John Singer Sargent and has published several books on his life and work, the exhibit includes just one piece of Sargent’s work, “a wonderful Impressionist-style sketch of his sister. It usually hangs in a downstairs room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where it’s kind of dark. So it should be a real eye opener to see it here in daylight, especially as it hangs about six feet off the floor,” Trevor says.

Most all of the exhibit’s works are on canvas or board, with no works on paper. This was a deliberate choice on Trevor’s part, as these can all be shown in the Salem museum’s sky-lit galleries, without use of artificial lighting.And that seems especially appropriate for an exhibit focusing on the season that, as many of these artists knew, was the most generous with its light.

 

Freelance writer Phyllis Edgerly Ring of Exeter, New Hampshire, is a regular contributor to ACCENT ON HOME AND GARDEN, as well as to American Profile, Christian Science Monitor and Delicious Living. She may be reached at info@phyllisring.com.