Charles Courtney Curran | CHILDREN BY THE SEASHORE

Charles Courtney Curran is most celebrated for his glorious Impressionist paintings of the figure in nature, drawing apt comparisons to his contemporaries Mary Cassatt and Frank Benson. It was a motif that he explored in his early studies at the Cincinnati School of Design and New York’s Art Students League, and in 1889 he joined the many other American artists who traveled to Paris and spent two years at the Académie Julian, working under Benjamin Constant and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. The Paris institution helped launch the careers of a generation of European artists as well as Curran’s fellow Americans Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Robert Henri, and Grant Wood. During his time in Paris, Curran focused on painting small, plein air compositions of smartly dressed women enjoying modern, daily life in urban parks, and he exhibited at the Paris Salon des Artistes Français to international acclaim. 

Returning to the United States in 1891, he began to paint idyllic scenes, seemingly removed from a specific era or place. Such timelessness led a contemporary critic to applaud the artist for his “rare faculty of painting for the sake of simple artistic pleasure in the expression of his subject quite without reference to that demand upon memory… [He] controls and marks his painting with the needed sentiment of peace and relish in man and nature” (“Charles Courtney Curran,” The Critic, ed. Joseph Bensongilder, v. 48, January-June, 1906, p. 39). 

The children in the present work, likely Curran’s son Louis, daughter Emily and other relatives, seem oblivious to his presence. Uninterrupted, they delight in whatever treasures they are uncovering in the sand. Rather than applying the stiff conventions of a commissioned portrait, Curran invites the viewer to enter into the children’s intimate and imaginative world, rather than contemplate them from a distance.