Samuel S. Carr (British/American, 1837 to 1908)
The English-born artist S.S. Carr made his living in the United States for almost 40 years painting cheerful green pastoral landscapes staffed with sheep and the figures who attended them. Such examples of his work have a strong kinship with those of Clinton Loveridge with whom he shared a studio from 1870 to 1907 in Brooklyn, New York.
Less common within Carr’s oeuvre, but much more highly prized today, are his wide views of the beaches of Coney Island and other spots along the south shore of Long Island, which he populated with well-dressed, middle-class vacationers.
On the opposite side of the Atlantic from Carr during roughly the same period, France’s best-known painter of beaches, Eugene Boudin, was painting a very similar subject at Trouville and Deauville on the Normandy coast. Like the beaches at Coney Island, the beaches at Normandy had become seaside resorts, for bourgeois Parisians to get out into nature to swim, have picnics, watch boats sail by, and, of course, indulge in the popular pastime of every class – people-watching. But there is a significant distinction between the work of the Frenchman and the American: Boudin’s figures are subsidiary to the painter’s overarching focus on the coast’s silvery light, the wind, and other concerns of landscape painting produced on-the-spot, outside. His figures are quite literally within the landscape, and are painted in the same windswept, pre-Impressionistic manner as the water and clouds. By contrast, Carr’s figures are the primary features of their settings. Their forms are insistently and crisply drawn and modeled, and in a real Victorian sense, are quite unambiguously comported. The prosperity which affords them the license to enjoy leisure activity is plainly on view in Carr’s details of their attire and their formal body language.
Unlike anything else in late nineteenth-century American art, Carr’s rare beach scenes offer a fascinating glimpse into one of the ways Americans enjoyed their new-found prosperity.
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, June 2009