Usher in summer with scenes of the beach

It’s officially summer, and what better way to celebrate than a trip to the beach? The sunny season offered several artists in SLAM’s collection inspiration. Many flocked to the coast to capture the jubilance often associated with summer, painting electric blue water, children at play, and brightly dressed vacationers. To experience the vibrancy of summer the way artists from different time periods did, continue reading. 

Children at the Seashore

Charming scenes of children at the beach were an especially popular theme for Jozef Israëls. In his native Netherlands, the sea is never far away, and the subject recurs often in his work. Variants include fishing, seafaring, and more-everyday subjects such as this view of a boy and girl playing on the beach. Israëls was a founding member of the Hague School, a group of 19th-century Dutch painters who looked back at their illustrious 17th-century predecessors, such as Rembrandt, for inspiration. At the same time, they absorbed the new trends toward naturalism and direct observation evolving in France. 

Even though Israëls pronounced copies of paintings to be “potboilers,” or an inferior work produced mainly for money, at least three painted versions of this composition survive, in addition to the Museum’s pastel. The earliest version, from 1863, was exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, France. 

This work can be viewed by appointment in the Museum’s Print Study Room.

The Beach at Trouville

A fashionably attired group of tourists congregate on the beach at the Normandy resort of Trouville. A bathing hut is visible to the right, while the scene is animated by the women’s colorful dresses in green, red, and yellow. Eugène Boudin often painted, as here, on small wood panels which were more suited to the windy conditions of the beach than canvases that swayed in the breeze. Boudin was an important mentor to the young Claude Monet, encouraging him to paint outdoors.

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse

In this painting, Raoul Dufy depicts a fine day at Sainte-Adresse, a resort town near his birth city, Le Havre, France. As a sailboat glides through bright blue waters, two women look on from a pier, shading themselves with parasols. A boy and an older man lean against a rail, holding out fishing rods whose curved shapes echo the contour of the shoreline. Such leisure outings were a frequent subject for the Impressionists, a group of avant-garde artists, whose paintings the younger Dufy had admired in Paris.

The Beach at Saint-Mammès

Alfred Sisley painted a view of barges and rowboats tied up along the sandy riverbank of the Seine some 40 miles to the southeast of Paris. Sisley, whose name reflects his English parentage, often represented the industrial traffic along France’s extensive network of rivers and canals. This work features a strong diagonal from the left foreground to right middle ground defined by the river’s edge. The artist’s lively brushwork and luminous blues, particularly on the sparkling water surface, animate the scene. 

This work is on view in Wells Fargo Advisers Gallery 218.

Lido

A white-capped woman in profile and a figure in a striped bathing suit walk along the beach, or lido, in opposite directions. The bathers behind them are tossed around in the sea, their limbs jutting out of the water at strange angles. Max Beckmann painted this work as a memory of a 1924 vacation at Pirano on the Italian coast. The disquieting atmosphere of the picture suggests the artist’s future interest in Surrealism, which focused on the imagery of dreams. For the critic Curt Glaser, this work represented the “fantasy of the real.”