EDWARD HENRY POTTHAST 1857-1927
Afternoon Fun
Oil on canvas, 24 X 30" (60.96 x 76.20 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 989-0-103

A seen in the gem-like oil, Afternoon Fun, Edward Potthast created a personal form of open-air painting, unlike the feeble, phrase-book French Impressionism that characterized the work of many painters associated with the National Academy of Design.
First educated in painting at the McMickin School of Design in his native Cincinnati, Potthast went abroad to academies in Antwerp, Munich, and Paris during the 1880s, and began producing colorful landscapes of French subjects that showed the influences of Robert Vonnoh and the Irish Impressionist, Roderic O'Conor. A Brittany Girl (1889, The National Museum of American Art) was one of the critical surprises of the French Centennial Exposition.2 With its combination of tight drawing and high-keyed Impressionist color, this small oil gave Potthast a leg up on the scores of young American painters who desperately wanted to achieve exhibition success in Paris. Still not yet a confident artist, Potthast returned in late 1889 to Cincinnati, supporting himself as a commercial lithographer and as an illustrator for Scribners and Century. In 1896, he moved to New York and, after another extended trip to Europe, started fulfilling his early promise as an Impressionist painter. By the early twentieth century, he had settled on his trademark subject, New York families taking the waters at the resorts near the city.
Deceptively casual, Afternoon Fun is a calculated nature study in which Potthast has orchestrated the details of the beach, selected the viewpoint, eliminated distracting details, and enhanced key elements. The eye moves from the foreground figure group, firmly drawn as in Winslow Homer's High Tide (1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), to the secondary bathers at the distant shoreline, who balance the picture. A similar discipline is imposed on the color scheme: areas of white peak at the kneeling female figure and are set off by a man wearing a navy blue blazer, whose hue is echoed in a second male figure in the middle ground, and by the thin line of cold sea water in the distance. Such contrasting blocks of color became a specialty of Potthast's. The brushwork varies from the broken Impressionist strokes that highlight the lavender puddles in the sand to the more evenly coated banks of saturated blues that define the blazers, water, and wide expanse of sky. It is a hard, clear American light against which the heads and shoulders of the bathers are clustered. The intensity of the hot sunlight dyes the air above the beach; perhaps there is a slight cooling effect in the gentle winds that typically blow off Long Island Sound late in the afternoon.
Afternoon Fun is an unabashedly sentimental picture. In the main, of course, American Impressionist painters were not intent on making probing queries into the condition of man. These are the smiling realities of the American bourgeoisie early in the new century, when a rush of leisure activities seized the New York middle classes. The soft and honeyed voice of Afternoon Fun sings with style and charm. The painting radiates the vigor and confidence of life in what historians call the Age of Innocence.
After World War 1, Potthast increased the production of his pleasurable images and participated in the late burst of American Impressionist painting. He produced dozens of new compositions of seaside genre, many revealing a strong stylistic similarity to Maurice Prendergast's art.

RICHARD COX