Painting the Prototype: The (Homo)Sexuality of Bazille’s Summer Scene

The lazy insouciance of Frédéric Bazille's Summer Scene of 1869-1870, an arrangement of seemingly disconnected vignettes circling around a central swimming hole, echoes the painting's relationship to male homosociality – both seem content to endlessly circumambulate their ostensible raison d'être without ever entering the water. The dimorphism in both sets of twins of course incorporates the familiar dynamic of an “opposite-sex” binary even within the very terms of a then-catalyzing homosexuality. One point is that Bazille's painting is everything a period French understanding of same-sex desire was not – it is rural, not urban; located in nature, not dense urban spaces; leisurely, not hurried and guarded; unrelievedly masculine and not gender dimorphic. Bazille's “truthful” tone is even made over into an invidious contrast to another Salon painting, Young Woman Holding a Tray by Charles Chaplin .