Summer by Frank Weston Benson

Summer, 1909

Summer shows the artist's daughters and their friends on a hillside near his summer home on North Haven Island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. Elisabeth "Betty" Benson and her friend, Anna Hathaway, are seated at the left, while Eleanor Benson stands shielding her eyes from the sun. Benson's niece, Margaret "Gretchen" Strong, is seated to the right. Benson worked from carefully composed photographs, which still exist in albums at the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts, and repeated several of the figures in Summer in later paintings. He was a member of The Ten, a group of American painters whose work reflects the influence of French Impressionism. While Benson captures the effects of natural sunlight and sea air with bright colors and loose brushwork, his figures remain imposing and sculptural.

Our puzzle design imagines a moment soon after the scene of the painting where two of the painting's models depart in a rowboat and the other two gesture goodbye to them. The painting is situated on an island in Maine, and many of the whimseys draw on imagery from the state. A garden of lupine, puffins, a lobster, a lighthouse, a seal, and an old wooden sloop fill out the scene.

Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.