On the Bluff at Long Branch, At the Bathing Hour

After the Civil War, Long Branch became one of the leading playgrounds of the Atlantic seaboard, attracting visitors from the fashionable and theatrical world, although it never enjoyed the exclusivity of Newport or Saratoga. In Homer’s vivid image, a bevy of windblown, fashionable ingenues, drawn by the white flag announcing calm water, approach the steep wooden staircase that led from the top of the high sand dunes known as the Bluff to the bathhouses on the wide beach below. Many of these pictorial motifs also appear in one of Homer’s most famous oil paintings, The Beach at Long Branch, 1869 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).