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| Simon Vouet Summer (series, The Four Seasons) ca. 1644-45 oil on canvas National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin |
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| Roger de La Fresnaye The Bathers 1912 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Joan Miró Bather 1932 oil on panel Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Théodore Roussel Summer 1900 etching British Museum |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Summer 1891 oil on canvas Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Camille Pissarro Bather 1895 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Grace Hartigan River Bathers 1953 oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Jasper Johns Summer 1985 encaustic on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Robert Motherwell Summer Collage 1984-85 acrylic and collage on board Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Anonymous American Photographer Beach Couple 1929 gelatin silver print Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York |
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| Winslow Homer East Hampton Beach, Long Island 1874 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Otto Müller Bathers in the Dunes ca. 1922 oil on burlap Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin |
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| Henri Matisse Bather 1909 oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| David Park Bathers 1954 oil on canvas San Francisco Museum of Modern Art |
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| Max Pechstein Summer Day 1911 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Stephen Frykholm Herman Miller Summer Picnic 1979 screenprint (poster) Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Hans von Aachen Personification of Summer before 1615 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
There is no 'mystery' in Racine – that is to say, there are no metaphysical speculations in him, no suggestions of the transcendental, no hints as to the ultimate nature of reality and the constitution of the world; and so away with him, a creature of mere rhetoric and ingenuities, to the outer limbo! But if, instead of asking what a writer is without, we try to discover simply what he is, will not our results be more worthy of our trouble? And in fact, if we once put out of our heads our longing for the mystery of metaphysical suggestion, the more we examine Racine, the more clearly we shall discern in him another kind of mystery, whose presence may eventually console us for the loss of the first – the mystery of the mind of man. This indeed is the framework of his poetry, and to speak of it adequately would demand a wider scope than that of an essay; for how much might be written of that strange and moving background, dark with the profundity of passion and glowing with the beauty of the sublime, wherefrom the great personages of his tragedies – Hermione and Mithridate, Roxane and Agrippine, Athalie and Phèdre – seem to emerge for a moment towards us, whereon they breathe and suffer, and among whose depths they vanish for ever from our sight!
– Lytton Strachey on Racine (1908)