The Bathing Hour, Chester, Nova Scotia

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FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG

William Glackens spent the summer of 1910 in Chester, Nova Scotia, painting the scenery and daily life around him. Here he captures the pleasures of summertime leisure. As one figure floats across the water on his back, bright white paint describing the spray from his foot, four women cool off in the center; a boy teeters in a boat while another runs along the dock. Fashionably dressed women chat by the waterfront while a nursemaid accompanies a small child into the bathhouse. Wet bathing clothes hang from a laundry line stretching across the middle ground. The inclusion of such mundane details helped Glackens build a convincingly realistic scene. The Bathing Hour was exhibited at the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913. Barnes purchased it directly from Glackens, his good friend, the following year.

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