Intertidal Life: Guzzle in Sight

I don't know what was uppermost in the mind of Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts  when she painted A Beach Afternoon, whether it was the tide going out on a summer day or the people breathing in the briny air.  But I know what I thought when I first discovered it: "Aha!   There's a guzzle."

The linguistic origins of the word guzzle are still in dispute but Massachusetts owns the word now.    In Cape Cod (1865), Henry David Thoreau described seeing a whale on the beach  "dragging in over the bars and guzzles."  Historian John R. Stilgoe includes guzzle in a category that he calls "topographical localisms," meaning a word that comes into being because it fills a need to name something that local people recognize.  Low spots on the beach, caused by the movement of wind and water,  sometimes capture enough  water that it too courses as large ocean waves do.  Sometimes a guzzle breaks through a sandbar at low tide to become a  tidal channel.

 "I can paint as well as any man." -  Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts

That confidence was hard won.   Although born into a prosperous family who could easily pay for her tuition at Academie Julian, Roberts's desire to become a p[painter was opposed by her mother.  Roberts persevered and one of her paintings  was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1892.  She became estranged from her father following his interference in her career.   Following a serious illness and an operation in1926,  Roberts was hospitalized for depression at Massachusetts General Hospital.  It was there that she hung herself on March 12, 1927.

I know I keep repeating this but -  little has been written about the work and life of Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts (1871-1927).   Some information is contained in the Archives of the Concord Art Association and in files of the Boston Public Library.  I only know this after reading "Elizabeth Roberts and the Concord Art Association" from the Massachusetts Painters Projects (Boston, Vose Archives: 1993.)

Image:
Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts  - A Beach Afternoon, c.1910, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Summertime, and the Living is Easy

"I loaf and invite my soul," Walt Whitman proclaimed in Leaves of Grass.  

As a picture of relaxed ratiocination Young Girl Stretched Out On A Bench is difficult to beat but I would not have given it a second look had I not read  "The Guardian Angel" written by Neil Philip at Adventures In The Print Trade. Carl Larsson was a purveyor of sentimentality I would have said.   Until recently,  the equal contribution in every way to the Larsson enterprise of the artist - and Carl's wife - Karin Bergoo Larsson barely registered on many of us either.

The deliciousness of the scene is the first thing that suggests summer to me. The utter relaxation of the little dachshund lying along her side as the young woman reads the paper and cradles the cat, seems so unguarded and comfortable that it appears unposed.   The suggestion of a tree frames  the image, leading the viewer's eye toward the red pillow that has been upended into its most comfortable position.

The feast of diagonals on display here is organized in a harmonious hierarchy and that, I think, was deliberate.  The green slatted  bench is multi-colored within its narrow range while, on the other side of the white swath of the blanket,  the irregularly striped cushion underneath her, complete with candy-striped fringe. The color red of the stripes near the top of the blanket join with the red printed cushion to outline the young woman in the green and white striped dress. To put all this into words makes it sound busy and stiff, which it is not. This may be Carl Larsson's masterpiece, I think.

Image:

Carl Olaf Larsson - Young Woman Stretched Out On A Bench, 1913, Louvre Museum, Paris.

Joy in Our Cause

"Women's rights are human rights; human rights are women's rights." - Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Like the fabulous globes created for King Louis XIV of France, moments in the history of the world cascade around us all the time; sometimes we mark them and sometimes they are lost on us as our attention is turned elsewhere.  From my mother I learned something about the date August 26, 1920 that her mother passed on to her: how, after women won the right to vote in the U.S., while some women formed the League of Women Voters, other women took oaths promising never to exercise the franchise.

I think of those women every time I cast a ballot, and I always do.   I think of them when I  remember the day my mother took me to a demonstration at the local newspaper plant where women were protesting employment ads that were segregated by sex and the press-men stood at the second floor windows and spat on us.  And I also remember a day when I was one of hundreds of women who returned to Seneca Falls in search of our history, only to find that the site of the convention of 1848 was  unmarked, a laundromat in fact!

This is a moment of paradox: as measurable levels of violence  are declining worldwide, violence against women is on the rise and, for the first time in my lifetime, there are more men in the world than women.
Frederick Douglas was right: "Power never concedes anything without a struggle.  It never has.  It never will."  

Today is also a moment of joy in our cause.  Savor it.

To read: Claiming An Identity They Taught Me To Despise by Michelle Cliff, Watertown, MA, Persephone Press: 1980.

Image Jean-Louis Aubert - photograph of Vincenzo Coronelli's Globes for the Sun King, Louis XIV, (c. 1681-83) 2005, Grand Palais, Paris.