Winslow Homer’s ‘Summer Night’ Returns to Cambridge

One of Winslow Homer’s most striking works, “Summer Night,” has arrived at the Harvard Art Museums, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay until July. The enigmatic 1890 painting of a Maine seascape comes to Cambridge, Homer’s own birthplace, as the result of a painting swap with Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, which in turn borrowed Frédéric Bazille’s “Summer Scene” from Harvard’s collections for a large-scale exhibition on Bazille. According to Harvard’s curators, “Summer Night” marks a significant turning point in Homer’s art and a unique—if temporary—addition to Harvard’s collection.

Cassandra Albinson, the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of European Art, noted that the painting’s synthesis of American and Parisian Impressionism is uniquely at home in the galleries of the Harvard Art Museums. “One of the things we do in our division is mix European and American art from around the same time,” she said. “A lot of museums don’t do that, but we feel that it is an important thing to do, and [‘Summer Night’] seemed like it would be a really important touchstone for us.”

Equally excited about the painting’s temporary residence was Ethan Lasser, head of the museum’s division of European and American art, and the Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Curator of American Art. “It’s a moment in Homer’s career that we really don’t have represented in our collection, and it is a particularly high moment in his career,” he said. “ We have Homers from 25 years earlier that share aspects of this painting or foreshadow aspects of this painting. In this way, it sits nicely in our collection.” He added that the painting forms a key element in the second-floor gallery devoted to American and European art dating from the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. “It’s a moment when American and European art really intersected, which is kind of the grand argument of this whole installation,” he said.

Albinson said that although it seems strange to request an American painting from a French museum, it is appropriate to bring “Summer Night” back to its roots. “We thought it brought a lot of iconic American [imagery] for people to look at…. Also, maybe because it’s not by a French artist, the [Musée d’Orsay] could sort of imagine it coming here for a longer time. We felt it was a very high quality piece they were offering us,” she said. “We do have a collection of French Impressionism, so when we were looking at what the Musée D’Orsay had, it was hard to find a piece that we felt we had to have by a French artist that we can’t represent well in our galleries. But this was something that we didn’t have, so we felt it would be a cool thing for people to see.”

The painting, which shows two women dancing in the moonlight and a cluster of silhouetted figures juxtaposed against a glistening seascape, has a history of neglect that contrasts with its current prominence in the museum galleries. Homer painted “Summer Night” in 1890 after spending time in Paris. He showed the work first in 1891 in New York City, to mixed response. For 10 years, Homer attempted to sell the painting in America but was unsuccessful. In 1900, he sent the painting to the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where it was the recipient of a gold medal and was purchased by the French State.

Lasser noted that this painting reflects the ways in which American art was changed by American artists who were traveling abroad and were inspired by European art. “[‘Summer Night’] has so much French painting in it. Even as it’s a subject of rugged Maine coastal life…, it’s a very Parisian picture. It’s in America for a decade, and he can’t sell it,” he said. “All of his other seascapes are high dramas of men rescuing women or the storms coming over your shoulder. They’re big pictures of these pregnant moments of something terrible that is about to happen. This painting is obviously not that at all: It’s more Impressionist in its subject. It is, then, unsurprising that American audiences didn’t like this painting, as it had none of the drama [of Homer’s other works].”

Displaying “Summer Night” also inspired Albinson and the Harvard Art Museum curators to consider which works could complement it and to bring some new pieces out of storage and into the gallery. “[‘Summer Night’ has] these very dark and moody colors. [Homer] made us rethink what we’re doing in the gallery here, so we decided to reinstall so we could showcase similarities between his work and work by artists like Whistler,” Albinson said. Albinson also compared the works in this room to the other Impressionist galleries. “A lot of times in Impressionist galleries, we talk about light, and Impressionists are very interested in the way natural light makes things look. But we thought, let’s think a little about darkness and night scenes and nocturnes,” she said. “It’s nice since it has allowed us to rethink how we display objects from our collection.”

The curators plan to build on the painting’s mystery as a focal point for discussion and learning. Lasser and Albinson were both excited to observe aspects of the painting that did not appear in reproductions and are organizing a variety of programs around close looking in the gallery. “One of the privileges of having a painting like this here is the more you look at it with other people, the more is revealed,” Lasser said. “I’m [still] at the stage of interpreting. What I’m seeing is still changing.”