Signed with monogram l.l.: WB

Oil on panel, 47 by 80 cm (18 ½ by 31 ½ ins)

Exhibited: London, New English Art Club, 1911, no.65

White Summer was probably painted on a visit to the sands at Saint Valery sur Somme. It is one of Bayes's most impressive and ambitious beach scenes of the 1910s which (typically as here) have the artist's own family as the central subject. The two figures depicted are most likely to be the painter's wife Kitty Bayes and the children's domestic nurse Jenny Millar, who was aged 21 years at the time of the 1911 Census. Walter and Kitty's son, Alfred, who turned three in 1911 is shown at his mother's feet. Bayes’s exhibits at the first Camden Town Group exhibitions in the same year as the present work received significant critical attention, The Daily Telegraph critic noting in December of that year “There is something satisfying in the austere modernity of Mr Walter Bayes…. He is able to suggest beneath the aerial envelope, beneath the perpetually changing vesture of the earth, something of architectural structure, of permanence” (The Daily Telegraph, 14 December 1911, quoted in Wendy Baron, The Camden Town Group, Scolar Press, 1979, p.214). Critics went on to label Bayes as both a “Modernist” for the simplification of form (something in evidence in this painting) and a “Classicist” in respect of his concern for rhythm and design. The latter of these would  ultimately set him apart from some other members of the Camden Town Group. I am grateful to Grant Waters for his assistance in cataloguing this work.