 Hello everybody, and welcome to today's edition of Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and Happy Independence Day. These short takeouts are intended to focus attention on particular aspects of the collection and today I've selected a picture by an artist I've already discussed more than once in these takeouts, and that's the American artist and Philadelphia-born artist William Glackens. It's called Seascape with six bathers, Bellport, and it was painted around 1916. We begin with a detail in celebration of Independence Day of this flag on the back of this boat and as we back out and put it into context we can see the full picture and perhaps its title as we see six figures bobbing in fairly shallow water in the foreground as is not uncommon with some of Glackens paintings for as specific as he could be in his illustrations oftentimes figures in his paintings are more or less anonymous. As we see here figures are just sort of sketched in we don't have facial features for instance but what Glackens was so well able to do is to capture particular qualities of figures in motion and something I've spoke on before but each of these figures is doing something slightly differently that distinguishes them. Also these brightly colored bathing caps you can see that also allows these figures in the foreground to really stand out. The composition rather has a very sort of sketchy quality about it a kind of impromptu nature to it as if Glackens just sort of dashed this off and it has the impression of being done on the scene of him actually sort of looking out to to the water and just sort of jotting down in paint this scene but that's not actually the case we have a preliminary sketch that Glackens began this composition back in 1913 so several years before the picture the final picture was actually completed and that tells us something about Glackens working method and that is that he would go about and his son Ira wrote eloquently about this that he would always have a pencil and scrap a paper or a notebook with him as he was out and about and constantly sketching and there there are pictures of Glackens actually at Bellport sitting on the seaside and looking out to the ocean and sketching and there he's trying to capture very quickly the the essence of the moment and then he would take those sketches and use them as a starting point for the final composition which is which is what we have here and remarkably he's able to retain that sense of immediacy. Glackens has composed this picture in a very specific way he's created a series of bands that stack sort of on top of each other and create a sense of deep preceding space so we have the band in the foreground of the figures in the shallow water we have the pier with the boats then we have a band of water sailboat bobbing in that water then a further pier more water than the horizon line and then the sky. Glackens creates the sense of atmosphere although it's bright and there's brilliant light everywhere there's also a kind of haziness to it a bit of a cloudy day where light is filtering through and in keeping with his unique and individual adoption of impressionism he's all but eliminated shadows we just get a hint of what would be shadow underneath this pier but instead of using black he articulates it with with green and in so doing he's able to retain the intensity and vibrancy of his palette so along with the figures he's also given us some specific details and that's in in particular this boat this sailboat that's situated in the middle of the picture he's actually given us two kinds of boats so he's giving us a sailboat showing us a sailboat as well as this motorboat with a cabin and it's the one that is displaying the American flag and this boat this two sailboat again has very specific qualities to it in particular the angle of the large sail and it looks like although again he's not giving us a lot of detail in it but it looks like a sailboat that's very specific to to Bellport itself it was a boat that was produced in Bellport and it was actually called the Bellport Bay design BB for for short and I'm curious if there are any viewers that are from Bellport or who visit Bellport if you recognize either one of these boats I'm not a sailor myself but I'm curious if you if you can identify them because I'm curious to know what kind of specific boats they are but again in keeping with Gleiken's interest he gives us these levels of specificity but also then just sort of sketched in quality it really has this wonderful sense of of immediacy of the looseness of his application of color and in the the brilliance of color as well as the vibrancy of it as I mentioned he began this composition with a sketch in 1913 likely in Bellport so Gleiken's and his family spent summers in Bellport from 1911 to 1916 and while they were there they stayed in the Carmen Cottage which was a a well-known place that they rented for the summer and Bellport had become a kind of artist's colony that attracted painters as well as writers and one of the visitors to the to the Gleiken's was Albert Barnes and his wife Lara who were staying up in Blue Point where Mrs. Barnes's mother had a had a cottage um and uh this year that Gleiken's began this in 1913 was a really a monumental year for for him as well as for American art as this uh this summer followed what was known as the or what has come to be known as the armor ratio that took place in um in the in the winter of uh the early part of 1913 and of which Gleiken's both exhibited work but was also tasked with organizing the American artists in that collection in that exhibition rather and although it was intended to highlight progressive um and contemporary American painting it was a show that was very much dominated by the European artists present in that including artists like Marcel Duchamp and a sculptor Brancusi. In any case it also followed the year after Gleiken's had traveled to Paris to purchase paintings for Albert Barnes tasked to find the best examples of modern painting and those paintings that Gleiken's brought back from that trip uh became the the core the foundation of the of the collection of the Barnes Foundation and many of those works remain remain here in the collection to this day. I want to show you where the picture is in the collection it's in gallery 12 it's a gallery that's commonly referred to as the American gallery because it's uh in entirely works by American artists including Marie's Prendergast here and above and then these four works all by William Gleiken's but the picture we're looking at is over the door here and so you get a sense of its scale and this picture is one of a series of pictures of these beach scenes that really occupied Gleiken's for those years up until 1916 after which he returned to only sporadically and occasionally but they really constitute an important part of of the body of his work. As I mentioned Gleiken's was born in Philadelphia he was a classmate of Albert Barnes and so it's appropriate that I chose a painter in a collection that's in Philadelphia um the city well known for its role in the founding of our our country and where the story goes George Washington asked Betsy Ross to first create a flag for this new country a version of which we see flying on the boat the motorboat here any case when you come to Philadelphia and you come to the Barnes Foundation I encourage you to go to gallery 12 look on the west wall over the door for this picture by William Gleiken's and other works by Gleiken's and American painters that are throughout the collection uh until then happy independence day from the Barnes Foundation and we'll see you next time on Barnes Takeout 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