The Bathers

Walter Stuempfig, artist

1914–1970

The Bathers, 1940s

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: oil; canvas

Dimensions:
Canvas/Support (Height x Width x Depth): 95.3 x 116.2 cm
Canvas/Support (Height x Width x Depth): 37 1/2 x 45 3/4 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 44 1/2 x 52 1/2 x 1 3/4 in

Credit line: Gift of William Inge to the Student Union

Accession number: 1970.0196

Not on display

Add to portfolio

If you wish to reproduce this image, please submit an image request

Images

Label texts

Soundings

In the early 1930s, Walter Stuempfig studied in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a venerable bastion of traditional representational art. The Academy’s curriculum was developed decades earlier by Thomas Eakins, who taught painting, and his successor Thomas Anshutz (whose painting hangs to the right). Stuempfig’s experiences at the Academy shaped his artwork, and he later taught there for several decades, continuing Philadelphia’s distinguished Realist tradition.
Stuempfig’s heroes were Caravaggio, Edgar Degas, and Eakins, each a highly individual painter but all major contributors to the Realist tradition in Western art. Among Stuempfig’s favored early subjects were sunny beach scenes inspired by his love of the New Jersey shore where he spent many happy and productive summers. At Stuempfig’s first solo exhibition in New York in 1943, a critic for the New York Times praised such paintings for an expression “as personal as it is lyrical.” In later life, following the premature death of his wife, the straightforward realism and celebratory note of Stuempfig’s early works like The Bathers yielded to a more melancholic mood that, according to another prominent critic, verged on “something close to Expressionism.” The artist, however, always resisted such categories. “I don’t like labels,” he declared. “I have to be in love with a subject to paint it, that’s all.” CCE

Exhibition Label:
"Dreams and Portals," Jun-2008, Kris Ercums and Susan Earle
Intro Label:
This summer display features selections from the Spencer’s permanent collection, including works that may evoke dreams and ideas of place, near and far.
The works range in media from painting and watercolor to collage, textile, and video. Some may transport you to other places, such as the lyrical "Blue Door (La Porte Bleue)" by French artist Pierre Lesieur. Reflecting the artist’s travels to North Africa, this painting evokes the sea or an open door in a way that suggests a dream, or a portal.
Many works feature abstract imagery, at times suggestive of dreams, or passages to other landscapes, be they of the mind or actual places. Others combine abstraction and figuration, like the William T. Wiley drawing
"Feeding Time." Others teeter between realism and abstraction, such as "Foam Chrome II" by Gary Pruner.
A portal can be defined as a door or gate or entrance, especially a grand or imposing one. Paintings themselves are like portals. They allow us to enter worlds and spaces like nothing else can.
Let your mind wander and see what dreams you might recall, or what new perspectives you might gain.
Label:
Don’t we all sometimes dream of summers spent with friends lazing on the beach and boating on the sea?