Edward Hopper, the greatest of American painters, the master of loneliness and nostalgia, captured the beauty of summer in his ‘Summertime’, a picture of a girl standing on the steps of a classic pillared entrance of a house, her pretty white legs half covered in shade, a straw hat with a black ribbon covering her flowing reddish hair. Hopper loved to depict people taking the sun. Very few of his countless paintings show wintertime.
Irwin Shaw’s wonderful short story Girls in their Summer Dresses perfectly captured the magic of summer and what it does to young men and women. All of us associate summer with heat, heat being good, cold the opposite. Youth associates summer with freedom from the slavery of school, especially boarding school. Summers lasted longer back then, when all men seemed to wear panama hats and white suits, and the ladies acted like, well, ladies. It’s all so far away now, but for two brief sweltering days it all came back. Then it was back to reality.
Taki, The Spectator (May, 2009).
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