Benson in bloom: a new look at Summer

(17) Ibid., p. 43.

(18) Benson's passport is dated March 29, 1883 (Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts). The Boston painter R. H. Ives Gammell (1893-1981), who studied with Benson in 1913, recalled that he "cut a very imposing figure indeed [and] he was always impeccably clad." According to Gammell, the head of the Boston branch of F. L. Dunne ("the finest, and certainly the most expensive men's tailor in New England") clothed Benson for the remainder of his life in return for one his paintings (R. H. Ives Gammell, The Boston Painters, 1900-1930, ed. Elizabeth Ives Hunter [Parnassus Imprints, Orleans, Massachusetts, 1986], pp. 87-88).

(19) Ives Gammell observed: "For several successive years [in the 1920s] Frank Benson reported an income in six figures from picture sales" (ibid., p. 90). According to the artist's great-granddaughter, "When he sold a painting, he would buy stock. In this manner, he gradually built up a strong portfolio that gave him a sense of security when buyers were few" (Bedford, Benson: American Impressionist, p. 126).

(20) Douglas Davis, "The Puritan Impressionists," Newsweek, August 6, 1973, p. 52.

(21) William H. Truettner and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, "The Discreet Charm of the Colonial," in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, ed. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999), pp. 96-97. The authors incorrectly assume that all four young women depicted in Summer were Benson's daughters.

(22) Consider, for example, these large oil paintings: The Hilltop, 1903 (private collection, formerly owned by Malden Public Library); Eleanor on the Hilltop, 1912 (United States Trust Company of Boston); and On Lookout Hill, 1914 (Detroit Athletic Club).

(23) Charles Dudley Warner, Their Pilgrimage, illustrated by C. S. Reinhart (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1887), p. 149. Reinhart's illustration (see Fig. 8) also appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 73, no. 434 (July 1886), p. 181, when Warner's novel was serialized.

TREVOR FAIRBROTHER is the guest curator of Painting Summer in New England, on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, from April 22 to September 4. Benson's Summer is included in the exhibition, which is accompanied by a book of the same name, copublished with Yale University Press.

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