The third of this month’s sun-struck pictures is Summer Scene, which was painted by the little known, short-lived French Impressionist Frederic Bazille in 1869. First exhibited at the Paris salon in that year, where it was received by some critics with acclaim, by others with ridicule, the work is now to be found in America, at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A touching, ambitious, albeit slightly awkward painting, it is worth seeking out.
Bazille was a close friend of Claude Monet and a great admirer of Edouard Manet, but while the Summer Scene reflects his youthful sense of kinship with those two giants of French nineteenth-century painting it also amounts to a statement of independence. The picture is Bazille’s response to their famous and rather earlier large-scale paintings on the theme of the modern picnic, or Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, with which he was certainly familiar (he posed for one of the figures in Monet’s Dejeuner). He too presents a scene of modern outdoor leisure, treated on a grand scale, although his subject is not picnickers but a group of male bathers, swimming, wrestling or resting on the banks of the River Lez, in the artist’s native Provence. The bright and vivid colours of the sky and sunlit meadow reflect Bazille’s rejection of prevailing conventions of studio lighting, and his allegiance to “the new painting”, as it was known (the term “Impressionism” was yet to be coined). But the self-conscious contrivance of the figures, many of whom have been posed to recall the compositions of antique sculpture and Old Master painting, shows that he also remained powerfully drawn to the example of classic art. His close friend Edmond Maitre remarked that Bazille “was at once the most ‘advanced’ and the most ‘museum’ in his tastes.”...
