M. Victor Leventritt Lecture

Winslow Homer’s Summer Night, on loan to the Harvard Art Museums from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is often described as one of the most extraordinary nocturnes in the history of American art. This scene of two women dancing in the moonlight at the water’s edge is one of the first oil paintings Homer completed after settling on the coast of Maine in 1883.

This event will bring together three scholars who are providing new insights into Homer’s work: Frank Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and curator of an upcoming exhibition on Homer and photography; Hélène Valance, assistant professor of English at the Université de Franche-Comté and author of the recently published American Nights: The Art of the Nocturne in the United States, 1890–1917; and Jennifer Roberts, the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.