Summer Day, 1911, oil on canvas, 36-1/8 x 32-1/8 inches, framed by Gill & Lagodich for the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, custom-made replica c. 1911 American Arts and Crafts painting frame; lemon-gilded hand-carved and cast ornament on wood; molding width 7” Note: original frame: hand-carved signature verso: 19 M 11 / Carrig-Rohane/ Thulin-Murphy Co./Boston / #926. Replica commissioned by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. “As the Gilded Age drew to a close, American artists experimented with the palettes of their frames as well as their canvases. With its unusual pale gilding and wide undulating profile [this] frame … was designed to complement the light effects captured in the lush garden pigments of an American Impressionist painting. Light-karat, greenish lemony gilding is a modern specification rooted in the silver finishes of European nocturne frames. … the artist might have chosen lemon gold to continue the hints of sunlight in a summer scene where a higher-karat yellow or red gold would clash. Paler gold could simulate filtered sunlight around a landscape, a continuation of the painted canvas. … Combining forms of different countries, the frame has a synthesis of motifs that in lesser hands would have become a pastiche, but here was transformed by the masters of Carrig-Rohane into a new kind of American design.”—T. Gill, Beaux Arts & Crafts: Masterpieces of American Frame Design 1890–1920, p. 34."'Summer Day' can be seen as Benson’s affectionate comparison of his young daughters’ radiance and beauty to that of nature itself, an assertion of their essential equivalence to summer’s warmth, light, and air. The sunny outdoor scene depicts eighteen-year-old Elisabeth and thirteen-year-old Sylvia casting their eyes toward the high horizon line, where the boundary between sea and sky nearly dissolves. The billowing sails on and just below the horizon reinforce a sense of gentle movement, as do the girls’ cascading gowns, loosely arranged hair, and decorative ribbons, all of which are enveloped by soft ocean breezes. Benson’s broken brushwork appears lightly but quickly stroked, and his high-keyed palette of whites and white-inflected blues glinting off the summer sea is a ravishing display of Impressionist technique perfectly tuned to his ephemeral, sun-shot subject." —Crystal Bridges label

Children In The Woods,  1905, oil on canvas, 32” x 30” framed by Gill & Lagodich for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, custom-made replica American Arts and Crafts painting frame, c. 1907, Hermann Dudley Murphy/Carrig Rohane, Boston maker; gilded hand-carved wood. “Benson began to experiment with plein-air painting in the late 1890s, often depicting his own children out of doors. This canvas portrays his three daughters near the family’s summer retreat at North Haven, Maine. Eleanor, the eldest, recalled: “When we were in North Haven, Papa would often have us put on our best white dresses and then ask us to sit in the grass or play in the woods. We thought it was silly and the maids made such a fuss when they saw our clothes afterwards.” Benson permitted his children to read or play cards while posing but disguised these diversions in his final compositions.”