Summer

Summer is upon us! For this week’s Art Wednesday, let’s take a look at a collection of paintings focused on summer, with quotes from literature. Summers are for resting, being outside, playing in water, and getting windswept and sun-kissed. Happy summer, everyone.

Berthe Morisot, Summer's Day, 1879

“Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.” – C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Cassatt, Children Playing on the Beach, 1884

“The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.” – Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Gauguin, Tahitian Landscape, 1891

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

– Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

Hopper, Second Story Sunlight, 1960

“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house… it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape…” – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Matisse, View of Collioure, 1905

“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summer cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year… crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.” – E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

Monet, Poppy Field in Argenteuil, 1875

“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” – Henry James, An International Episode

Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees… I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889

One last quote to wrap up today’s Art Wednesday celebration of summer. This one is from the English philosopher, Bernard Williams: “If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.”

Winslow Homer, A Summer Night, 1890