A Song of Summer
Oil on canvas
30 1/8 x 40 1/8 inches
Circa 1915
As published in:
Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson Collection
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection
The Art of the American Guitar, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 2022–2023
As exhibited in:
The League of Extraordinary Artists, 2024, Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina
Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art, 2022
Helen M. Turner: The Woman's Point of View, 2010–2011, Dixon Gallery & Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; Huntsville Museum of Art, Alabama
Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson Collection, 2015–2018, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; McKissick Museum of Art at the University of South Carolina, Columbia; Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts at Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina
Recalling her childhood in Louisiana following the Civil War, Helen Turner later recounted: “I realized that I loved art, but that educational training was out of the question. Poverty was all about me.” Instead, she took a teaching degree and taught for several years. She finally made it to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League at age thirty-seven.
Turner supported herself by instructing women at the Young Women’s Christian Association in Manhattan, where courses in clothing design prepared women for careers in fashion and journalistic illustration. She did not depict urban scenes, preferring outdoor settings featuring women performing simple tasks in dappled light. Many of these canvases were executed on the porch of her house at Cragsmoor, an art colony ninety miles northwest of New York City.
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection, 2018–2021, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; Mississippi Musuem of Art, Jackson; Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia
An artist who did not receive professional recognition until her fifties, Helen Turner overcame personal setbacks to become the fourth female and first Louisianan to achieve the rank of full academician from the distinguished National Academy of Design in New York. Beginning in 1906, she spent her summers at the art colony in Cragsmoor, New York, where her seasonal residence became the light-filled setting for her best-known impressionistic work. One such painting, A Song of Summer, reveals Turner’s expertise in depicting the female figure outdoors. Here, a young woman strums a guitar against a sun-dappled woodsy background—a solitary moment of reverie in nature’s sitting room.