Small Yacht Racing

Samuel S. Carr was an American genre painter active in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. He frequently depicted pastoral scenes (as they were rather popular at the time), eventually transitioning into images of children and seaside compositions. He frequently re-used multiple figures and shapes within the same painting, which some claim lends an uncanny stillness to his works.

Small Yacht Racing contains several such figures: one can see that the young boys in blue and brown jackets on the distant side of the tide pool have companions in the far right of the painting. The girl in pink on the left has a sister on the right too, as does the gentleman in a dark jacket, tie, and boater hat.

Yet if there is any stillness in the composition, it comes from the rigidity of the subjects’ motions. The barefoot girl in the foreground holds out her hand in a somewhat awkward fashion, although Carr has delicately rendered the light glancing off her hand. Across the tide pool, the boy in brown makes a similarly unnatural gesture, as does his companion to the right. Oddly stiff are the yachts’ sails as well, though ripples in the water indicate that they are moving along swiftly.

Still, Carr’s subtle treatment of the color gradations in the sky cannot go unnoticed. The hues of blue-green blend into each other seamlessly, creating an almost iridescent background for the nearly impressionistic clouds. Hints of light that peek around their edges form a glowing effect that elegantly separates them from the skyscape behind.

Though the exact title of this painting is contested, there is a strong belief that it depicts a beach along the coast of Long Island, New York.
- Anthony deFeo