Bathers at Bellport

Glackens began summering in Bellport, on Long Island's South Shore, around 1911, and the town became one of the most productive locations of his mature career. By this point he had largely shed his early debt to newspaper illustration and to the dark-toned urban realism of his fellow Ashcan School painters, moving decisively toward an open-air palette shaped by his close study of Impressionism, and of Renoir in particular. The Bellport pictures, of which this is among the finest, show Glackens at his most relaxed and inventive, translating the pleasures of a prosperous coastal summer into paint with an ease that is deceptive: the composition is carefully staged, the tonal relationships precisely controlled beneath the apparent spontaneity. Glackens was a founding member of The Eight, the group that mounted a landmark independent exhibition in 1908 in direct challenge to the conservative National Academy of Design, and his subsequent turn toward colour and light rather than gritty subject matter was not a retreat but a deepening of his conviction that American painting needed to free itself from academic restraint. Bathers at Bellport is held in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and stands as one of the defining statements of American Impressionism in the decade before the Armory Show reshaped the conversation.