Paintings I love
William James Glackens (American, 1870 – 1938)
The Raft
1915.
Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cm
Barnes Foundation
In this sunny tableau of summertime leisure on the shore of Bellport, Long Island, bands of young women and men swim, sail, and slide and dive from a floating raft. Glackens’s lively strokes of high-keyed colors, especially in the iridescent seawater, offer an American variation on bathing scenes by French modernists such as Monet and Renoir. Albert Barnes applauded his friend Glackens’s galvanization of American art and believed that the artist’s brilliant use of color helped viewers to “see life with a reality that our unaided selves never would have experienced.”
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