Our Double Take series is a collaboration with Harvard Art Museums, pairing objects from both collections: a plant from the Arnold Arboretum + a work of art from the Harvard Art Museums.
Celebrate late summer with Jean Frédéric Bazille’s “Summer Scene (Bathers)” and the Arboretum’s poplar collection!
The Arboretum’s ~30 Populus accessions (commonly called poplars, aspens or cottonwoods) are clustered on the eastern slope of Peters Hill. In late summer, the trees’ leaves shimmer in the slightest breeze, dappling the ground beneath them with light and shadow. Bazille’s painting is alive with human movement—figures swim and wrestle under the trees. Spend any time among the Arboretum’s fluttering poplar collection, and the painting’s trees will evoke movement, as well!
When this painting was first exhibited at the Salon of 1870, critic and artist Zacharie Astruc wrote of Bazille, “The sun inundates his canvases.” It appears that Bazille began this composition in his Paris studio but completed the details of the landscape after traveling to the south of France, where he painted a similar landscape of the river Lez. Although individual figures have been identified as derivations from Italian Renaissance sources, including Andrea Mantegna and Sebastiano del Piombo, the inspiration for the subject may have been the modernist novel Manette Salomon (1867), in which the Goncourt brothers describe a brilliantly lit scene of young men bathing. The artist, one of the most important and influential exponents of the “new painting” that gave rise to impressionism, died in the Franco-Prussian War, four years before the first impressionist exhibition was held.
Visit the Populus tremuloides, or quaking aspen (581-2016*B), at the Arboretum on Peters Hill.
Visit the painting (1937.78) at the Art Museums on the second floor.