The Boys of Summer

I don’t know whether it’s the men or the warmth of summer that I find more alluring in these paintings (It was 20°F here last night, and I had to keep the cabinet doors under the kitchen sink open so the pipes wouldn’t freeze). Probably it’s the combination of summer, nude men, and the outdoors, all of which go so well together.

Jean-Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870) thought so too. Two of his paintings combine the beauty of men and summer in a way that cannot help but inspire longing (especially in cold November). In one of his best known works, Scène d’été (Summer Scene, 1869, oil on canvas, Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge, MA), several men in various states of undress swim, wrestle, lounge, and daydream amidst an idyllic backdrop. What I find most interesting about this work are the bathing suits, which seem inconvenient and superfluous, almost an afterthought.

Bazille dispenses with clothing altogether in Pêcheur à l’épervier (Fisherman with a Net, 1868, oil on canvas, Fondation Rau pour le Tiers-Monde, Zurich), which shows a well-formed young man about to cast his net, while in the background another removes his socks, his clothing in a heap in the grass next to him. Bazille seems to be playing with the viewer here; he attempts to distract us from the fisherman’s provocative nudity by portraying him with a net, which is clearly mismatched with the setting; the nude youth stands at the foot of what looks to be a rather shallow pond in the middle of a forest glade, where clearly a fishing pole would have been more appropriate. Perhaps Bazille wanted to avoid the obvious pun that a pole would have suggested.

Bazille’s circle in Paris included not only fellow Impressionists Monet, Renoir, and Manet, but also Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, all of whom were surrounded by controversy of some kind. Some were considered scandalous and vulgar by their contemporaries, and two of them, Rimbaud and Verlaine, carried on a tempestuous affair with one another. Whether or not Bazille was himself erotically drawn to men remains a mystery, though I can’t imagine how he could paint such scenes without seeing and appreciating the physical beauty of his subjects. Moreover, Bazille painted the world he knew. Like his life outside the canvas, the world of Bazille’s paintings is one in which men are comfortable and relaxed in each other’s company (even when naked); they enjoy a casual intimacy and an easy familiarity with one another and each other’s bodies.

Bazille’s corpus of work is small. He did not live long enough to become prolific. During the Franco-Prussian War, Bazille volunteered for the army and was sent to the front lines where he was killed in battle at Beaune-la-Rolande. He died on November 28, 1870 at the young age of twenty-eight.