Bathers at Bellport, William James Glackens
William James Glackens (March 13, 1870 – May 22, 1938) was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School, which rejected the formal boundaries of artistic beauty laid-down by the conservative National Academy of Design.
His dark-hued, vibrantly painted street scenes and depictions of daily life in pre-WW I New York and Paris first established his reputation as a major artist. His later work was brighter in tone and showed the strong influence of Renoir. During much of his career as a painter, Glackens also worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City., William Glackens (1912)
Glackens spent the summers between 1911 and 1916 at Bellport, Long Island, a quiet, unspoiled community that attracted artists, writers, and musicians. There he painted a series of beach scenes— vibrant canvases that depart from his somber and dreary work of earlier years. During the Bellport summers Glackens painted numerous works at Great South Bay that showed his family and friends enjoying summer pleasures—the sun and the beach, sailing and swimming. In Bathers at Bellport, horizontal docks and sand bars bound the sparkling blue water; bright yellow ocher and burnt sienna bathhouses contrast with crisp white sails. A visual memory of the summer of 1912, this work reveals Glackens's growing interest in impressionism and his understanding of the important influence that French art had upon American art. The clarity of colors derived from nature, so characteristic in French impressionism, clearly struck a chord with Glackens. Bathers at Bellport is reminiscent of Claude Monet's paintings of the 1860s in the broad and direct treatment of color, brevity of touch, and dashes of jewel-like pigment that denote foliage and the sun's shimmering reflection on the water.
