Summer Women
June 30, 2023
Morning Glories, Winslow Homer
MALE PAINTERS have given us countless paintings of women in summer.
They have depicted women in gardens, women on the beach, women on cliffs, women sitting under trees in silent forests. They have painted women reading books on garden benches, women lying in hammocks, women sunbathing, women with parasols, women in canoes and women swimming in the sea. They have painted moody women and entrancing women and innocent women and indolent women.
The subject of women in summer is a natural one. For the tranquility and beauty of summer moments correspond to the feminine at its best.
Men (and female artists too) have lavishly portrayed the contemplative side of women in summer paintings. Pagan artists of Greece and Rome produced female nudes, often exquisite. But they could not capture what later artists did with the fully clothed woman in a summer landscape. The soul took precedence over the sensual, without eclipsing it. (All of these paintings, by the way, would be absurd with women in pants. The dress is the ceremonial expression of the contemplative side of women. Pants are for doing, and also obliterate the inspiring, mysterious differentiation of the sexes.)
Contemplative men may become great philosophers, contemplative women rarely achieve fame in the world or the heights of intellect. Their mental activity is not any less important or essential. That’s what these paintings suggest. The world needs this stillness. There would be no philosophers without it.
Life demands activity, constant work and accomplishment from men, often cruelly. What is it worth, how can it go on, how can civilization go on, without the calm created by pools of feminine reverie? Its nothingness is indeed something.
But these are indeed aristocratic thoughts in a proletarian, Soviet-style age.
Feminists like to say men historically excluded women from the world of art. Nonsense. Women are art. In their being, not their accomplishments, these ideal women complement the glories of summer. The great sacrifices involved in producing these works (feminists speak of art as if it is power when in fact it is usually lonely abnegation and grueling work) attest to how much men are driven not just by outward beauty, although definitely that, but by this mysterious inner dimension.
[Thanks to It’s About Time for these images, which are a tiny sample of the paintings of women in summer landscapes.]
Mrs. Chase in Prospect Park, William Merritt Chase; 1886
Young Woman, Winslow Homer
Three Woman Knitting by the Sea, Jozef Israëls
Lady with a Parasol, Frederick Frieseke; 1905
Breakfast in the Garden, Frederick Frieseke; 1911
Italian Girl with Flowers, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (Spanish artist, 1863-1923)
Woman Reading in the Garden, Richard Emil Miller
— Comments —
Elizabeth writes:
Paintings of women working in fields (in dresses, bien sur) are plentiful. And just as legitimate an expression of femininity or femaleness or whatever it’s supposed to be called. These women are being just as much as they are doing. Those are not two mutually exclusive things.
