A Summer Night

By the 1880s Moore had established a reputation as a painter of abstract beauty devoid of literary content, obvious subject and symbolic meaning. This painting, with its four figures carefully arranged across the canvas in subtly contrasted but related poses, can also be seen as concerned only with the academic study of the female figure, informed by the artist’s admiration for Greek sculpture. But there must be more to this picture than that; the impassive erotic languor of the four girls going to bed in their elaborately decorated lagoon side suite is too suggestive; the flesh painting is very realistic for Moore and even the colour tonalities are rather torrid, lacking his usual subtlety and restraint.