The Bathing Hour, Chester, Nova Scotia - William Glackens, 1910

Glackens painted this work during the summer of 1910, when he and his family vacationed in Chester, Nova Scotia, a coastal resort town then popular with American and Canadian professionals. By this point Glackens had already helped organize the landmark 1908 exhibition of The Eight, the loose coalition of American painters who broke from the staid National Academy of Design to insist on the vitality of modern urban and leisure life as worthy subjects. Yet where his former colleagues Robert Henri and John Sloan fixed their gaze on the gritty energy of New York, Glackens moved steadily toward the sunlit world of Impressionism, drawn especially to Renoir, whose influence he had absorbed on early trips to France. The Bathing Hour sits at the pivot of that evolution: the subject is American Realism's world of ordinary people at leisure, but the handling, broken light, shadow rendered as color rather than tone, and an almost buoyant sense of atmosphere, belongs unmistakably to the Impressionist tradition. The painting entered the collection of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, where Albert C. Barnes, an early and passionate champion of Glackens, assembled one of the most significant concentrations of the artist's work in existence.