 Hello everybody, and welcome to today's edition of Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. I'm Bill Perthes, the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education, and it's my pleasure to share with you another work by the American artist William Glackens. Some of you may remember I looked at a picture of his earlier in another takeout. You're looking at the east wall of the main gallery of the Barnes Foundation. This is an ensemble anchored by two large works by central artists to the collection, down below the artist's family by Pierre Auguste Renoir painted in 1896, and above that the Large Bathers by Paul Cézanne, a work that Cézanne worked on for the last 10 years of his life until his death in 1906. It's a very prominent ensemble, ensemble being the word that Dr. Barnes gave to the juxtaposition of objects, paintings, objects, and other things in the collection, but flanking this central ensemble, surmounting the doors that go into gallery two on our right and gallery seven on our left, are two pictures by the American artist William Glackens. On the left is called The Baiting Hour, Chester, Nova Scotia, and that's from 1910. So that's the picture over here. And to the right, a picture called The Raft from 1915, and that's the picture I'd like us to look at today. Here's The Raft. This picture demonstrates at least two of the things that are most notable about the work of William Glackens. So as I said, this was painted in 1915. This is several years after he had changed his style from an earlier palette that was darker and more influenced by the American artist Robert Henry, and he had adapted both a palette and the application of color from Impressionism. So one is his handling of color, and also another thing that makes it distinctly Glackens is his interest in focusing on activity, and that is a quality that we see throughout this picture. So first off, I want to sort of locate us, so not only is this 1915, but from 1911 to 1916, William Glackens and his family spent summers at Bellport on Long Island in New York State, and this picture was painted in the summer of 1915 while they were vacationing there. Bellport was a place that attracted many artists, and when the Glackens were staying there, many prominent American artists were either staying nearby or would come to visit, including artists like Maurice Prendergast, and another frequent visitor was Dr. Laura Barnes. Laura Barnes' mother had a summer cottage that she rented just down the coast in Blue Point, also on Long Island, and when Glackens' son Ira fondly remembered the Barnes' driving up and visiting them and taking the family out in the Barnes' car for drives around Long Island, Barnes and Glackens were high school schoolmates, and they reconnected in the early part of the 20th century in 1912 and rekindled a friendship that lasted through Barnes' life and through Glackens' life. Glackens died tragically young in 1938. So we're located here on the water in Bellport, and we're looking out into the water, and we're confronted by quite a boisterous scene. So we have this large group of figures, and here's really, again, where the skill of Glackens presents itself, that each one of these figures, as you look at it, is doing something specific and individual. They're leaning, they're reaching, they're climbing, they're splashing, they're preparing to jump off a diving board or to slide down a slide. They're bobbing through the water or they're just standing on or sitting on a pier. But each figure has a sense of animation to them. Each figure has a sense of vitality. If we look at some of these figures, such as the group of figures that are on the raft that gives the picture its name, look at how each figure has this sense of specific animation. No two figures are doing the same thing. Each, as I said, is very individual. However, each figure is very anonymous as well, because Glackens has simplified the figures. You'll notice that they don't have facial features, for instance. If we look at the proportions of the bodies, he has elongated them. If we look at the hands and feet, he's simplified them down to a little tapers. What this increases is the lines that the figures create, so extended arms or raised arms or splayed legs become the lines, torsos become lines, and those lines further animate the figures in the specific actions that they're doing. There is a sequential nature to this picture, where there's a series that Glackens allows us to imagine that a figure is preparing to get on the slide, is on the slide, slides down, splashes into the water, bobs through the water around the other side of the raft, and then climbs back on the raft. He shows this to us with individual figures, different figures, in different moments in that process. It's not only the figures that are animated, but if we look, the clouds have a sense of movement to them, as do the boats. The sailboats, for instance, tilts in the wind as the raft itself bobs from side to side. Again, there's this tremendous sense of animation, of everything in the picture being activated. That's true even of figures that are standing or sitting. Even this figure here, who stands with his arms on his or her arms, it's actually difficult to tell, on their hips. There's a sense of aliveness to them. They're not static. They're paused, but they're not frozen. Similarly, the two figures that are sitting on the edge of the dock, each sits in a different way. One leans and turns, the other sits a bit more upright with her hands in her lap, so that there's a specificity to what they're doing, even though the figures themselves are fairly anonymous. Another thing that this picture demonstrates is Glockens' use of color. You'll notice that different areas have a sense of color, for instance, the water feels and looks blue, and yet when we look at it, we look at it in detail, look at all of the different colors that Glockens has used to create the sense of water. We have yellows and greens and reds and blues and whites. The cumulative effect is that we read blue water, but not only is it abundance of colors, but the colors have been laid down in little directional brushstrokes, and those little directional brushstrokes help animate the water itself, so that what we get is a sense of light glinting off small caps of water that is just slightly churning, and that, again, further activates the figure, the pictures. Not only that is, light fills everything. Light is everywhere in this picture, and even where we read shadow, so, for instance, under the dock, look that he uses a different color, so he uses green under the dock to convey the sense of shadow, and that green retains a sense of vibrancy and vitality of color, of brightness, which gives the picture an overall sense of a brilliant, colorful, and light filled. So, as I mentioned, Glockens spent five summers in Belport. This is one of several pictures that we have of Glockens painting figures by the water. It was a sort of discreet portion of his output, but it certainly satisfied his overall interest in figures in motion. One little side note, I mentioned that this was painted in 1915. That was also the first year that the word bathing suit was used. It was actually used for a style of swimming attire created by the Jensen mill company that put out a bathing suit, and that word certainly has stuck. It's not a bathing suit, or what we see these figures wearing is not the kind of bathing suit we are familiar with these days, but it was certainly the fashion of the time. This gives us a little taste of the summer activity that we're about to enter, and gives us an opportunity, even in these challenging times when we're certainly feeling very isolated, to at least visually and vicariously enjoy the activity of being out with a group of people out on the water. So next time you come to the Barnes Foundation, I hope you'll look for this work in the main gallery and other works by William Glackens throughout the collection. Join us again tomorrow for the next edition of Barnes Takeout. We encourage you to follow us and to leave comments. We really do enjoy reading what your reflections are on our observations about works in the Barnes collection. Until then take care. I'm Tom Collins, New Bauer Family Executive Director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.