The Season of Being Seen: Famous Paintings About Summer

Famous paintings about summer include Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol, David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash and Winslow Homer’s Summer Night. Across centuries, artists have used parks, beaches, swimming pools, gardens and brilliant sunlight to explore the pleasures of warm weather, from swimming and socializing to travel, romance and long evenings outdoors. Contemporary artists including Mickalene Thomas, Derrick Adams, Faith Ringgold, Kerry James Marshall and Amy Sherald have expanded that tradition, creating unforgettable images of Black leisure, family life, freedom and belonging.

Summer changes not only the landscape but the way we inhabit it. We eat outside, seek water, travel, gather with friends and spend more time in public, often with considerably less clothing than the rest of the year requires. The light grows stronger, the evenings stretch, and ordinary pleasures begin to feel like occasions. Painters have been fascinated by those transformations for centuries, although their summer scenes reveal something else as well: who gets to enjoy the long afternoon, who is working while everyone else relaxes, and what happens when private lives become visible in the sun.

The Art Lens is Dandelion Chandelier’s exploration of art and visual culture, from painting and photography to sculpture, installations and design, and how they shape the way we see the world.

At a glance: 16 important artworks • Impressionism to contemporary painting • summer light and color • swimming, beaches and gardens • public leisure and private pleasure • Black joy and belonging • the beauty of summer after dark

All photographs are by Pamela Thomas-Graham for Dandelion Chandelier.

[FEATURED IMAGE — Original summer photograph by Pamela Thomas-Graham. Ideally, a landscape or urban waterfront scene that captures brilliant summer light, water or the particular pleasure of being outdoors.]

Summer in New York is a season of questionable decisions made for entirely understandable reasons. We agree to sit outside in temperatures that would be considered unreasonable in almost any other context, travel considerable distances for the prospect of water, and organize elaborate weekends around the possibility of doing very little. Restaurants spill onto sidewalks, the parks become collective living rooms, and by July practically everyone seems to have developed a strongly held opinion about the best place to swim.

As a photographer, I find summer light both irresistible and infuriating. At midday, it can be unforgiving; by evening, it turns familiar streets and buildings into something almost theatrical. People behave differently in that light, too. They linger, gather, perform, withdraw, and occasionally look as though they would prefer not to be photographed at all. Painters have been fascinated by these shifting relationships for centuries, and some of the greatest summer paintings are as much about how we inhabit the world as they are about the weather.

The extraordinary thing about summer is the number of ways people find to enjoy it. An afternoon on a riverbank can become an elaborate social performance, a swimming pool can represent a whole philosophy of living, and a city rooftop can contain an entire imagined universe. The paintings gathered here move between those experiences, from the familiar pleasures of sunshine and friendship to more complicated questions about who is seen, who belongs and who gets to spend the afternoon doing absolutely nothing.

famous summer paintings and artworks: 16 works worth knowing

The sixteen works in this collection range from nineteenth-century Parisian picnics to California swimming pools, Harlem rooftops and a remembered beach in Lagos. Some are among the most recognizable paintings in Western art; others deserve to be much better known. Together they offer a persuasive account of summer as the season when life moves outdoors, the light becomes part of the story, and people reveal rather more about themselves than they might have intended.

the social life of summer

There is a particular social energy to the first weeks of summer, when invitations multiply, weekends acquire destinations and eating outdoors begins to feel like a minor civic obligation. The nineteenth-century French painters were wonderfully attentive to these occasions, though their pictures suggest that a supposedly relaxed afternoon could be as carefully orchestrated as any formal gathering.

1. georges seurat, a sunday on la grande jatte (1884–86).

[IMAGE 1 — Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884–86. Art Institute of Chicago. Use the full horizontal composition.]

Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte may be the most impeccably organized summer afternoon in art history.

Parisians have gathered on an island in the Seine to promenade, fish, rest beneath the trees and display a remarkable collection of hats. Women carry parasols, children stand beside their parents, and a monkey accompanies a couple whose elaborate clothing seems an improbable choice for a relaxing afternoon by the river. Everyone appears to have found a position and decided to remain there indefinitely.

The apparent stillness is particularly strange given the painting’s subject. A public park should be full of movement, yet Seurat has arranged his figures with a precision that makes the scene feel almost ceremonial. Their poses, clothing and careful separation suggest an elaborate system of social distinctions, even as they share the same stretch of grass.

Seurat spent two years developing the enormous painting, using small, carefully placed marks of contrasting color to produce the optical effects associated with Neo-Impressionism. The technique is fascinating to examine up close: individual strokes and dots remain distinct, while at a distance they combine into the illusion of light and atmosphere. The result required extraordinary patience for a subject that, in ordinary life, would have changed from moment to moment.

What interests me is the peculiar tension between the promise of leisure and the behavior of the people enjoying it. This is summer recreation, certainly, but very few of the figures look entirely at ease. They are visible to one another, dressed according to their social positions and seemingly conscious that a public afternoon involves a certain amount of performance.

Anyone who has attended an outdoor gathering where everyone appears determined to look effortlessly relaxed will recognize the atmosphere. Seurat understood that being seen enjoying oneself can occasionally become a full-time occupation.

2. pierre-auguste renoir, luncheon of the boating party (1880–81).

[IMAGE 2 — Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–81. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, by contrast, understood that the best summer lunch is one at which everyone forgets to check the time.

His Luncheon of the Boating Party takes place on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise, a restaurant beside the Seine at Chatou. Friends and acquaintances gather around a table scattered with glasses, bottles and fruit, their conversations overlapping beneath a striped awning. Straw hats, casual clothing and a glimpse of the river beyond the railing establish an atmosphere of conviviality that remains almost impossible to resist.

Renoir included people from his own circle, among them Aline Charigot, his future wife, who appears near the foreground with a small dog. The figures seem absorbed in one another rather than concerned with the viewer. Conversations are underway, glances cross the table, and the whole gathering has the wonderfully untidy quality of a lunch that has expanded well beyond its original schedule.

The painting’s technical brilliance is inseparable from that sense of ease. The awning filters the sunlight into a warm glow, while the white tablecloth and clothing reflect light into the shadowed spaces. Renoir’s brushwork gives the figures and objects a lively immediacy, even though the composition is carefully constructed.

There is a delightful abundance to the scene, not least in the number of people who appear to be having an excellent time in entirely different ways. Some are engaged in conversation, some seem more interested in one particular companion, and others have settled into the pleasurable business of simply being present.

Seurat’s park is an elaborate arrangement of people sharing public space without much apparent intimacy. Renoir’s balcony offers the opposite experience: a crowded social world held together by affection, flirtation, food and the prospect of spending another hour exactly where everyone already is.

3. édouard manet, le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863).

[IMAGE 3 — Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.]

Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe is not the kind of picnic anyone would describe as uncomplicated.

Two fully dressed men sit on the grass beside a nude woman who looks directly at the viewer, while another woman bathes in the background. The setting is leafy and apparently pleasant, but the arrangement is disconcerting. The men seem absorbed in conversation, while the unclothed woman acknowledges our presence with a composure that makes the situation more, rather than less, unsettling.

When Manet exhibited the work at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, it provoked considerable controversy. The problem was not simply the nudity, which had long been accepted in academic art when presented through classical mythology or historical subjects. Manet’s figures were recognizably modern, and the woman’s direct gaze refused the conventions that had made the female nude a comfortable object of contemplation for male viewers.

The painting also drew on earlier compositions, including Renaissance precedents, while deliberately disrupting their assumptions. Its ambitious scale and unconventional treatment of space contributed to the sense that Manet was challenging the established hierarchy of subjects worthy of serious painting.

Yet what remains most striking is the relationship among the figures and the viewer. The woman does not avert her eyes or behave as though our presence is irrelevant. She looks directly out of the picture, making the act of looking itself part of the subject.

The history of bathing and the female figure in art makes an amusing counterpoint. In François Boucher’s The Four Seasons: Summer (1755), now at the Frick Collection, three nude women enjoy an idyllic outdoor bathing scene, their bodies arranged for the pleasure of the viewer. The Rococo fantasy is elegant, decorative and entirely comfortable with its own conventions. Manet’s picnic, painted just over a century later, made the act of looking far less comfortable, bringing a recognizably modern woman into a composition that refused the traditional excuses of mythology and allegory.

Manet turned a seemingly familiar scene of outdoor leisure into a question about the power of representation. Who is allowed to look, who is expected to be looked at, and why should the arrangement feel so uncomfortable? The question would acquire an entirely different answer nearly 150 years later.

4. mickalene thomas, le déjeuner sur l’herbe: les trois femmes noires (2010).

[IMAGE 4 — Mickalene Thomas, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires, 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel. Use the monumental three-panel painting, not the related photograph or installation.]

Mickalene Thomas’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires is more than seven meters wide, an extraordinary expanse of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on three wood panels. It depicts three Black women seated together in a lush, elaborately patterned setting, dressed in vivid contemporary clothing and looking directly toward the viewer.

The women are magnificent, and they know it.

Thomas began the project with a staged photograph made in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden, later developing the composition into several forms, including this monumental painting. The work openly acknowledges Manet’s famous picnic, but its visual language draws on a much wider range of sources: fashion photography, decorative interiors, Black popular culture and the artist’s fascination with the self-fashioning of women.

The differences between the two paintings begin with the figures. Where Manet places a nude woman beside fully clothed men, Thomas presents three fully dressed Black women whose styling is as deliberate as their poses. Elaborate hairstyles, richly colored garments and confident expressions replace the nineteenth-century arrangement of male spectators and female subject.

The changes are formal as well as social. Thomas’s composition is expansive, its patterned surfaces and sparkling rhinestones creating an environment in which glamour becomes almost architectural. The work is not merely large; it occupies space with an authority that refuses to be overlooked.

That scale matters. The grand tradition of Western painting has long celebrated mythological, historical and aristocratic subjects, while Black women have too often appeared at its margins or been absent altogether. Thomas places her figures firmly at the center, allowing them the same visual importance traditionally granted to the most elevated subjects.

But reducing the work to a correction of art history would miss much of its pleasure. The women are beautifully styled, the colors are spectacular, and the decorative complexity invites sustained looking. Thomas is clearly enjoying the possibilities of fashion, surface and presentation, even as she challenges the assumptions embedded in the image she has chosen to reinterpret.

The gaze is particularly revealing. Manet’s nude woman confronts the viewer, creating an uneasy relationship between the person looking and the person being looked at. Thomas’s women meet our eyes with a different kind of assurance. They appear entirely comfortable occupying the picture, and the viewer is left to decide how to respond to their confidence.

It’s a remarkable transformation. The picnic has become a stage for self-possession, with three women who seem to have arrived fully aware that the art-historical seating arrangements were overdue for revision.

the art of doing nothing

At some point in every summer, the weather makes a persuasive argument for abandoning whatever elaborate plans we have made and finding a body of water. The location may be a river, a public pool, a beach or the sort of impeccably landscaped private swimming pool that suggests someone has devoted considerable thought and expense to the business of relaxation.

Artists have been fascinated by these settings, partly because water creates such interesting visual effects and partly because swimming and lounging offer an unusually direct image of leisure. The pleasure can look effortless, although the paintings themselves often required tremendous work to produce.

5. georges seurat, bathers at asnières (1884).

[IMAGE 5 — Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884. National Gallery, London.]

Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières offers an interesting counterpoint to the meticulous social arrangements of La Grande Jatte. Young men rest beside the Seine, some sitting on the grass while others wade or swim in the river. Industrial buildings and smokestacks appear in the distance, establishing a setting very different from the fashionable island across the water.

The figures are separated by generous intervals, and the composition has a remarkable stillness. A young man sits in the foreground with his back turned toward us, gazing across the water, while others occupy the riverbank with an almost monumental calm.

The bathers’ clothes and the industrial setting suggest a working-class world, though the painting resists a simple narrative about labor and recreation. These young men are enjoying their afternoon, and Seurat grants their leisure the scale and seriousness normally reserved for more elevated subjects.

The contrast with La Grande Jatte is revealing. Seurat painted the working-class bathers before the more famous Sunday gathering, yet the two scenes seem almost to be looking at one another across the river. Their inhabitants occupy different social worlds, but the artist gives each a place within the modern landscape of leisure.

The river belongs to both, at least for the afternoon.

6. david hockney, a bigger splash (1967).

[IMAGE 6 — David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967. Tate collection, London.]

David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash is one of the most recognizable images of summer in twentieth-century art, although its principal character has already disappeared.

A modern house stands beside a swimming pool beneath a clear California sky. The architecture is crisply defined, a chair sits on the patio, and the whole scene seems organized according to exceptionally good modernist design. In the pool, however, a spectacular splash erupts from the water, announcing that someone has just completed a dive.

The diver is nowhere to be seen.

Hockney has given us the evidence of an action rather than the person who performed it, and the contrast between the still architecture and the exploding water creates the painting’s extraordinary tension.

There is also a wonderful technical paradox. A splash lasts a fraction of a second, yet Hockney spent considerable time carefully painting the white spray. The image freezes an instant that would ordinarily disappear almost as soon as we registered it, turning something fleeting into the central event of an otherwise perfectly controlled composition.

Hockney was fascinated by Southern California, where the climate, architecture and ubiquity of swimming pools represented a world very different from the England in which he had grown up. The swimming pool became an important subject in his work, suggesting the seductive artificiality of a place where pleasure seemed almost built into the landscape.

What I particularly enjoy is the painting’s sense of humor. Someone has made a dramatic entrance into the water, and Hockney has decided that the person is considerably less interesting than the splash they left behind. It is an entire summer afternoon distilled into one perfectly timed interruption.

7. derrick adams, floater 32 (2016).

[IMAGE 7 — Derrick Adams, Floater 32, 2016. Use the exact work from the artist’s Floater series, with its full medium and ownership details verified before production.]

Derrick Adams’s Floater 32 offers an entirely different kind of swimming pool portrait. A Black figure relaxes on a colorful inflatable float, surrounded by intensely blue water. The composition is graphic, playful and wonderfully direct, presenting the pleasure of floating as an occupation that requires no further explanation.

Adams developed his Floater series around images of Black people swimming, lounging and enjoying aquatic recreation. His figures are often constructed from sharply defined areas of color, with geometric patterns and accessories creating a visual language that feels both contemporary and deliberately stylized.

The historical context matters. In the United States, access to swimming pools and recreational facilities has been shaped by racial segregation and exclusion, making the seemingly ordinary act of relaxing in the water more culturally complicated than it might initially appear.

But Adams is not interested in turning his figures into illustrations of hardship. The work’s immediate pleasures are color, pattern and the extraordinary ease of the person floating in the pool. The body appears supported by the water, liberated from the practical demands that ordinarily organize our days.

The comparison with Hockney is especially appealing. His swimming pool is an immaculate architectural environment interrupted by the evidence of someone diving in. Adams gives us the person who has already arrived, settled onto a float and apparently decided to remain there for the foreseeable future.

There are worse ambitions for a summer afternoon.

when the light takes over

Summer light has a personality of its own, and it is not always agreeable. At its best, it makes color seem almost impossibly vivid; at midday, it can flatten faces, erase delicate shadows and create a glare that sends anyone with a camera searching for a more forgiving angle.

The painters who have handled it most successfully understood that illumination is not simply something that allows a subject to be seen. It can change the entire emotional character of a scene, making a familiar place seem exhilarating, mysterious or even faintly disturbing.

8. claude monet, woman with a parasol (1875).

[IMAGE 8 — Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.]

Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol seems almost to have been painted by the wind.

His wife Camille stands on a grassy hillside holding a green parasol, while their young son Jean appears lower on the slope. The sky is filled with swift, airy brushstrokes, and Camille’s white dress seems to move in response to a breeze that has animated the entire landscape.

Monet painted the scene outdoors, working rapidly to capture the shifting effects of sunlight and movement. The low viewpoint gives Camille an almost monumental presence against the sky, yet the looseness of the brushwork prevents the image from becoming formal or static.

The parasol is particularly important. It casts a greenish shadow across Camille’s face and upper body, while its circular shape provides a strong compositional counterpoint to the irregular movement of her dress and the clouds.

There is an extraordinary intimacy to the image, despite its open setting. Monet is observing his family, but the painting is as much about air and light as it is about the people. Camille seems almost to be moving toward us, her dress and veil caught by the wind, while the sky remains a restless arrangement of blue and white.

Summer rarely looks more agreeable than this, especially when there is just enough breeze to make a parasol genuinely useful.

9. edward hopper, second story sunlight (1960).

[IMAGE 9 — Edward Hopper, Second Story Sunlight, 1960. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.]

Edward Hopper’s Second Story Sunlight makes summer brightness feel considerably less reassuring.

Two women occupy the upper level of a house, one leaning into the sunlight while the other sits nearby. The architecture is sharply defined, with strong divisions between illuminated and shadowed surfaces. The light is brilliant, almost theatrical, yet the women remain strangely remote, their relationship to each other and the world beyond the house difficult to read.

Hopper was fascinated by the psychological possibilities of ordinary American architecture, particularly the relationship between buildings and their inhabitants. His figures often appear near windows, porches or doorways, occupying spaces that are simultaneously private and visible.

In this painting, the sunlight is so strong that it becomes almost another presence in the scene. It illuminates the building and the women with extraordinary clarity, yet reveals little about their thoughts or circumstances.

The contrast with Monet is striking. His summer light seems to dissolve boundaries among figures, clothing and landscape, while Hopper’s makes those boundaries sharper. Brightness creates distance rather than intimacy, and the atmosphere remains curiously unresolved.

Anyone who has looked across a New York street into a sunlit apartment understands how much can be visible without offering any meaningful knowledge of the lives taking place within it. Hopper made an entire career of exploring that distinction, and summer light gave him another way to make the familiar seem mysterious.

10. joaquín sorolla, strolling along the seashore (1909).

[IMAGE 10 — Joaquín Sorolla, Strolling Along the Seashore, 1909. Museo Sorolla, Madrid.]

Joaquín Sorolla’s Strolling Along the Seashore is so beautiful that one feels almost obliged to book a flight to the Mediterranean.

Two women, Sorolla’s wife Clotilde and their daughter María, walk beside the sea in long white dresses. The wind lifts the fabric, their garments echo the movement of the waves, and the sand and water reflect a brilliance that seems to fill the entire composition.

Sorolla was extraordinarily skilled at painting sunlight, especially the way it interacts with water and pale surfaces. Here, white is anything but a single color. The dresses contain passages of cream, blue, gray and warmer tones, while the surrounding sea and sky contribute shifting reflections that make the figures seem almost inseparable from the environment.

The composition is wonderfully dynamic. The women move through the scene, their garments caught by the wind, while the shoreline creates a strong diagonal that gives the image momentum. Nothing appears rigidly posed, although the arrangement is carefully controlled.

The clothes deserve particular attention. They are fashionable, elegant and thoroughly impractical for any activity more strenuous than walking along the beach, which may be part of their appeal. Sorolla transforms the movement of fabric into the principal visual event, making the painting as much about air as about water.

I’ve always thought that some of the best summer clothes understand the weather better than the people wearing them. Sorolla’s women are exquisitely dressed, but the wind is plainly in charge, and the artist is having a wonderful time recording the negotiation.

There is no need to search for a complicated allegory here. The painting’s pleasure lies in its extraordinary handling of light, fabric and movement, and in the simple delight of watching two women walk along the sea on a beautiful day.

a place in the sun

Summer changes the relationship between people and places, making beaches, parks, streets and rooftops central to how communities gather and remember their lives. For some artists, those settings become ways of exploring personal history; for others, they provide opportunities to reconsider which people have traditionally occupied the most important spaces in art.

The works that follow are united by summer, but their artistic ambitions are strikingly different. A Nigerian beach becomes an intricate archive of cultural memory, Harlem’s streets become a lively geometric composition, and a rooftop provides the setting for a child’s extraordinary imaginative freedom.

11. njideka akunyili crosby, “the beautyful ones” series #10: a sunny day on bar beach (2022).

[IMAGE 11 — Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones” Series #10: A Sunny Day on Bar Beach, 2022. Acrylic, colored pencil, pastel, charcoal and transfers on paper.]

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s “The Beautyful Ones” Series #10: A Sunny Day on Bar Beach is a painting about a place that cannot be separated from the memories attached to it.

The work depicts a young girl against the setting of Bar Beach in Lagos, Nigeria, using an intricate combination of acrylic paint, colored pencil, pastel, charcoal and transferred photographic imagery. The surface contains different kinds of visual information, with representational passages and photographic fragments coming together in a composition that feels simultaneously immediate and layered with memory.

Akunyili Crosby, who was born in Nigeria and later moved to the United States, frequently explores the experience of living between cultures. Her work draws on personal photographs, Nigerian popular imagery and domestic visual traditions, creating surfaces in which past and present seem to coexist.

The photographic transfers are especially important. Images appear embedded within other images, suggesting that memory is not simply something recalled after an experience has ended but something continually present in the way we see the world.

Bar Beach is not presented as an anonymous tropical paradise. It is a specific place within a particular cultural landscape, and the young girl belongs to that world rather than being inserted into it as an exotic subject.

The result is visually rich and emotionally complex, with the ordinary pleasure of a sunny beach day carrying the additional weight of remembered place and identity. Akunyili Crosby turns a familiar seasonal experience into a meditation on belonging without losing the warmth and beauty of the original scene.

12. jacob lawrence, summer street scene in harlem (1948).

[IMAGE 12 — Jacob Lawrence, Summer Street Scene in Harlem, 1948. Tempera on gesso panel. Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York.]

Jacob Lawrence’s Summer Street Scene in Harlem captures the energy of a neighborhood whose social life extends well beyond the walls of its buildings.

Figures occupy the sidewalk and street, their activities arranged within a composition of strong colors and emphatic geometric forms. Lawrence’s treatment of architecture gives the scene a powerful underlying structure, while the people moving through it create a lively rhythm that seems to animate the entire neighborhood.

Lawrence was one of the great visual storytellers of twentieth-century American art, celebrated for paintings exploring Black history, migration, labor and community life. His formal language was distinctive, using flattened shapes, sharply defined areas of color and carefully organized compositions to create images that were immediately readable yet structurally sophisticated.

In this summer scene, the relationship between people and architecture is particularly important. The figures are not isolated against a neutral background; they belong to a living neighborhood, with the buildings, street and public spaces providing the setting for ordinary social experience.

The painting has a sense of movement and communal energy that makes it feel very different from Hopper’s sunlit house. Where Hopper’s figures seem separated by the architecture surrounding them, Lawrence’s neighborhood is connected through shared activity.

Summer in Harlem has its own visual language, and Lawrence gives it the same artistic seriousness that earlier painters devoted to fashionable Parisian parks. The street is not merely somewhere people pass through on the way to more important destinations. It is where much of life happens.

13. faith ringgold, woman on a bridge #1 of 5: tar beach (1988).

[IMAGE 13 — Faith Ringgold, Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach, 1988. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Acrylic paint, canvas, printed fabric, ink and thread.]

Faith Ringgold’s Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach is one of the most beautiful works about summer in New York, although its most extraordinary moment occurs far above the familiar setting of a family gathering.

A group of adults and children occupy a Harlem rooftop at night, sharing food and conversation beneath the city sky. Above them, a young girl named Cassie Louise Lightfoot flies across the Manhattan skyline, her outstretched arms carrying her over the George Washington Bridge.

The rooftop is wonderfully specific. For many New Yorkers, particularly in neighborhoods where access to beaches and private outdoor space was limited, rooftops became places to gather and enjoy the evening air. Ringgold draws on those experiences, transforming the ordinary summer ritual into a setting for imaginative freedom.

The work’s physical construction is as important as its narrative. Ringgold combined painted imagery with fabric, quilting and handwritten text, creating a story quilt that draws on artistic traditions often excluded from the established hierarchy of fine art. The patterned border surrounds the central image, while the written narrative extends the picture beyond what can be seen.

That combination allows different forms of storytelling to coexist. The painting gives us the rooftop gathering and Cassie’s extraordinary flight, while the text provides details about her family, ambitions and understanding of the city. Ringgold’s work cannot be reduced to a picture with a decorative border; the materials and narrative structure are integral to its meaning.

Cassie’s flight is both delightful and deeply consequential. She imagines that flying over places gives her a form of freedom and possession unavailable through ordinary circumstances, turning the city’s familiar landmarks into a landscape of possibility. The George Washington Bridge becomes especially important because of its connection to her father’s work and the economic exclusions affecting her family.

There is something extraordinarily moving about the relationship between the rooftop gathering below and the child’s imagined journey above. The adults are enjoying an ordinary evening together, while Cassie transforms the same setting into the beginning of a much larger adventure.

Ringgold’s achievement is not simply to celebrate the pleasures of a Harlem summer. She gives the rooftop a scale of imaginative possibility that rivals anything in the grandest traditions of landscape painting, while using materials associated with domestic and communal life to create an artwork of monumental ambition.

Anyone who has spent a warm evening on a New York roof knows how different the city can feel from that vantage point. Ringgold understood that the change in perspective might be more than physical, and she made it the basis of an image that continues to invite us to look up.

14. kerry james marshall, past times (1997).

[IMAGE 14 — Kerry James Marshall, Past Times, 1997. Acrylic and collage on canvas. Use the full monumental composition; do not attribute it to the former McCormick Place collection as its current owner.]

Kerry James Marshall’s Past Times is almost nine feet high and more than thirteen feet wide, a scale traditionally associated with the grand ambitions of historical painting. Its subject, however, is a summer afternoon of Black leisure.

Figures dressed in white relax in a lush green landscape, enjoying a picnic, boating, golf and other recreational activities. A wide expanse of water occupies the middle distance, while tall buildings establish the setting as a modern urban environment rather than an untouched pastoral retreat.

The painting is filled with visual contrasts. The figures’ dark skin and bright clothing stand out against the green landscape, while the carefully arranged recreational activities create a sense of abundance that recalls the leisure scenes of Seurat and other European painters.

Marshall has spoken about the importance of creating paintings in which Black figures occupy the central positions historically denied them within the Western canon. In Past Times, he does so with remarkable confidence, granting his subjects the scale, complexity and visual authority of a grand pastoral composition.

Yet the painting is far more complicated than a simple celebration of recreation. The urban setting introduces questions about the relationship between public space and imagined escape, while details including radios and musical references suggest the cultural worlds inhabited by the figures.

The title itself is wonderfully ambiguous. Past Times evokes both recreation and history, suggesting that the idyllic scene may be a memory, an aspiration or an imagined version of a world that has not always been available to its subjects.

The painting also rewards close looking for its formal ambition. Marshall organizes a complicated composition filled with people, objects and activities without allowing the scene to become visually incoherent. The landscape is expansive, yet carefully structured, and the figures occupy it with an assurance that makes their presence feel both natural and monumental.

Its later history is notable as well. Originally acquired for Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, Past Times was sold at Sotheby’s in 2018 for $21.1 million, a landmark result for a work by a living Black artist at the time. The sale reflected a changing recognition of Marshall’s importance, although the painting’s artistic achievement had been evident long before the market caught up.

There is a temptation to treat the work primarily as a statement about representation, but that would diminish its pleasures. Marshall gives us an extraordinarily rich painting, filled with color, humor and visual invention, whose figures happen to be enjoying the sort of afternoon that artists have celebrated for centuries.

The crucial difference is that these subjects are no longer absent from the picture.

15. amy sherald, precious jewels by the sea (2019).

[IMAGE 15 — Amy Sherald, Precious Jewels by the Sea, 2019. Oil on linen. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.]

Amy Sherald’s Precious Jewels by the Sea offers a quieter kind of visual authority, though its colors are anything but subdued.

Four young people pose together at the beach, two women sitting on the shoulders of two men. Their bright swimwear and carefully arranged positions create a composition that recalls a family photograph, the kind of image taken to preserve a happy day by the water.

The painting’s scale, however, transforms that familiar arrangement into something monumental. The figures occupy the canvas with a formal dignity rarely associated with an ordinary beach snapshot, while the sea, sky and surrounding details provide a setting of almost theatrical clarity.

Sherald’s distinctive treatment of skin tones in grayscale, combined with vivid clothing and carefully controlled color, creates an intriguing distance from conventional photographic realism. The figures are recognizable and individual, yet the stylization gives them a presence that seems slightly removed from ordinary time.

The composition is also unusually balanced. The two elevated women create a rhythmic arrangement above the men supporting them, while the bright colors of the clothing echo and contrast with the blues and greens of the surrounding landscape.

There is pleasure in the scene, but it is not the exuberance of Adams’s floating figure or the complex social landscape of Marshall’s Past Times. Sherald’s subjects seem to have paused for a photograph, offering the viewer a carefully composed moment of connection.

The painting’s achievement lies partly in making that ordinary experience feel worthy of sustained attention. Four people enjoying a beautiful day by the sea become the subjects of a major American portrait, their presence neither exceptionalized nor diminished.

And unlike the people in Seurat’s park, who seem determined to maintain a certain social distance, Sherald’s figures have arranged themselves in a composition that depends entirely on physical connection. The intimacy is visible, even if the details of their relationships remain their own.

the night belongs to us

For all the attention paid to summer sunlight, some of the season’s most memorable pleasures happen after dark. The air cools, the crowds begin to disperse, and familiar places acquire a second life that can feel entirely different from the one they inhabited at noon.

There is a peculiar freedom to summer evenings, when the day’s practical obligations have receded and the night seems full of possibilities that might appear considerably less sensible in the light of morning.

16. winslow homer, summer night (1890).

[IMAGE 16 — Winslow Homer, Summer Night, 1890. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.]

Winslow Homer’s Summer Night is a wonderful painting with which to end, not least because it abandons the brilliant light that has dominated so much of the collection.

Two women dance together near the ocean under the dim illumination of evening, while other figures stand along the shore. The sea occupies much of the composition, its dark surface catching reflections that create a strange, almost theatrical atmosphere.

Homer was one of the great American painters of the sea, celebrated for his ability to convey its changing moods and physical power. In Summer Night, however, the relationship between people and water is unusually mysterious. The dancers appear absorbed in their movement, while the surrounding figures and dark waves suggest a world extending far beyond the immediate gathering.

The composition is fascinating for its balance of intimacy and vastness. The two women occupy a small area of light, their dresses moving together as they dance, while the sea beyond them seems almost limitless. Figures at the edge of the scene remain difficult to distinguish, and the darkness offers only fragments of information about the people gathered there.

Unlike Renoir’s boating lunch, with its abundance of conversation and social detail, Homer’s evening leaves much unsaid. We do not know what music the women are dancing to, what brought the group to the shore or how long the gathering will continue.

Perhaps that uncertainty is part of the painting’s appeal. Summer after dark has a way of loosening the ordinary arrangements of the day, allowing a familiar place to become briefly unfamiliar.

Homer gives us an image of people enjoying the moment without insisting that we understand everything about them. After an entire season of being seen, the darkness offers a welcome measure of privacy.

the season of being seen

By August, the long days have acquired a different rhythm. The light begins to lower, the social calendar gradually loses some of its urgency, and the prospect of another summer weekend becomes less a reason for elaborate planning than an opportunity to enjoy whatever the season still has to offer.

I’ve always liked that change in tempo. Summer begins with anticipation and a great deal of activity, but its later weeks can be more interesting, particularly when people stop trying to extract the maximum possible experience from every available afternoon.

Our companion Reading Room essay, The Season of Being Seen: Best Summer Books explores the same months through literature, from June’s public celebrations through July’s immersion in travel, family and water to the more reflective pleasures of August. And for readers following the changing year through art, our essays on famous paintings about spring and famous paintings about autumn offer very different encounters with light, color and seasonal experience. More discoveries can be found in The Art Lens.

Summer has a way of persuading us that the best things happen in daylight: swimming, boating, lunch outdoors, the first extraordinary view of the sea. Yet some of the season’s most memorable pleasures begin when the sun has finally surrendered the afternoon. The air becomes bearable, the crowds disperse, and familiar places seem to acquire a second life.

Winslow Homer understood that transformation. His dancers occupy a world in which the details are no longer entirely visible, the music is unheard, and the darkness gives the scene a freedom that the brilliant sunlight of Seurat or Sorolla could never provide. We can see the women dancing, but we cannot know everything about them, and the painting is more interesting for that uncertainty.

Perhaps that’s the real pleasure of summer. We spend so much of it outside, in public, available to be seen. By nightfall, the light softens and the demands of the day recede. The season that put us on display finally gives us permission to disappear for a while.

faqs:

what are the most famous paintings about summer?

Famous paintings about summer include Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81), Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol (1875), David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967) and Winslow Homer’s Summer Night (1890). These works capture the season through parks, picnics, swimming pools, beaches, changing light and long evenings outdoors.

why do artists paint summer so often?

Summer provides artists with unusually rich opportunities to explore light, color, movement and human activity. Longer days and warmer weather encourage people to spend more time outdoors, creating scenes of swimming, boating, picnicking, travel and public recreation. Summer paintings can also reveal differences in social class, access to leisure and cultural ideas about relaxation.

which impressionist paintings best capture summer light?

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party and Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol are important examples of Impressionist summer painting. Renoir uses warm, filtered light to create an atmosphere of social intimacy, while Monet captures the changing effects of wind and sunlight through loose brushwork and delicate color relationships. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte represents the later development of Neo-Impressionism, using carefully arranged marks of color to explore the visual effects of outdoor light.

what are the best paintings of beaches and swimming pools?

David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967) is one of the most famous paintings of a swimming pool. Joaquín Sorolla’s Strolling Along the Seashore (1909) captures Mediterranean light, wind and moving fabric, while Derrick Adams’s Floater 32 (2016) celebrates the pleasure of relaxing in the water. Amy Sherald’s Precious Jewels by the Sea (2019) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s “The Beautyful Ones” Series #10: A Sunny Day on Bar Beach (2022) offer distinctive contemporary interpretations of beach life.

which Black artists have created important paintings and artworks about summer?

Important summer-related works by Black artists include Mickalene Thomas’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires (2010), Derrick Adams’s Floater 32 (2016), Jacob Lawrence’s Summer Street Scene in Harlem (1948), Faith Ringgold’s Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach (1988), Kerry James Marshall’s Past Times (1997) and Amy Sherald’s Precious Jewels by the Sea (2019). These works explore leisure, family, community, representation and the freedom to enjoy ordinary pleasures.

how have artists used summer paintings to explore leisure and social class?

Artists have frequently used parks, beaches, rivers and gardens to examine social behavior and differences in access to recreation. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte depicts a carefully organized public gathering, while his Bathers at Asnières offers a view of leisure in a more industrial, working-class environment. Contemporary artists including Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas and Derrick Adams expand the historical representation of leisure through images of Black people enjoying public and private recreational spaces.

what are the most famous paintings of summer nights?

Winslow Homer’s Summer Night (1890), held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is among the best-known paintings of summer after dark. It depicts two women dancing beside the ocean, surrounded by other figures and the mysterious atmosphere of a moonlit shoreline. The painting uses contrasts between light and darkness to capture the unusual freedom and uncertainty of a summer evening.