Summer

Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Summer, ca. 1890, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.21
Copied Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Summer, ca. 1890, oil on canvas, 42 1⁄8 x 54 1⁄4 in. (107.0 x 137.8 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.21
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Artwork Details

Title
Summer
Artist
Date
ca. 1890
Location
Not on view
Dimensions
42 1⁄8 x 54 1⁄4 in. (107.0 x 137.8 cm.)
Credit Line
Gift of William T. Evans
Mediums
Mediums Description
oil on canvas
Classifications
Subjects
  • Figure group — female
  • Landscape — season — summer
Object Number
1909.7.21
Linked Open Data
https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/1909.7.21

Artwork Description

Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s paintings of elegant women evoked an exclusive world of beauty and refined taste. From 1885 until 1905, Dewing was a key figure in the artist colony at Cornish, New Hampshire, which included Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Abbott Thayer. They agreed that art and beauty offered a “higher life” for an age in which Darwin’s theories challenged Christian beliefs and urban industrialization disrupted life’s natural rhythms. Summer shows women in evening gowns theatrically posed in nature and conveys the “Cornishite’s” attitude that life should be a chain of beautiful moments. Every summer, Dewing orchestrated twilight picnics and participated in theatrical performances with fellow artists and writers in the woods of Cornish. (Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Nineteenth-century America, 1996)