The Bathing Hour

Glackens painted this during the summer of 1910, which he spent with his family in Chester, a seaside resort town on the south shore of Nova Scotia. He had been a founding member of the Ashcan School, the group of American realist painters who documented gritty urban life in New York and Philadelphia, but by 1910 his work was shifting decisively toward a lighter, color-rich Impressionist approach influenced by Renoir. His biographer described this transition as 'his conversion to mainstream Impressionism.' Beginning in 1911, the Glackens family made summer stays at coastal resorts a regular practice, and these summers produced some of his most celebrated paintings of Americans at leisure. The work is held at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, whose extraordinary collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings Glackens helped assemble — he was a childhood friend of Albert C. Barnes and made a pivotal buying trip to Paris in 1912 on Barnes's behalf.