August in the Country--The Sea Shore

August . . . at the Seaside: . . . The scene by the sea-side—the dolce far niente—the hunt for crustacea—the hour spent in sketching the distant schooner—the delightful tetes-a-tete— are they not all written in our memories?

Accompanied by such nostalgic musings, this image and the illustration Country Life in Summer: The Bathe at Newport are Homer’s earliest images of seaside recreation. Their busy compositions, filled with figural anecdotes drawn from the conventions of humorous genre painting and caricature, offer a marked contrast to the more sophisticated representation of seaside episodes in the designs that the artist created a decade later.