Summer by the Lakeside 1883

Elbridge Kingsley made this wood engraving titled ‘Summer by the Lakeside’ sometime in the late nineteenth century. It captures a tranquil waterside scene under the glow of a full moon. The image is evocative of the Barbizon school’s landscape paintings, which were popular at the time. But while the Barbizon painters sought to portray nature as it is, without idealization, Kingsley’s scene is a highly constructed one. He made it by cutting into the end-grain of a block of wood, allowing for very fine detail, a technique he learned from Timothy Cole. Kingsley, like many artists of his time, was concerned with realism but also with the picturesque, that is, with composing scenes that conformed to certain aesthetic ideals. Historians of art consider the social and cultural contexts in which art is made. They consult a variety of resources, from letters and diaries to exhibition catalogues and critical reviews, to better understand the meanings that art had in its own time.