Long Branch, New Jersey

On 19 July 1869, a few months into his presidency, Ulysses S. Grant came to Long Branch on the New Jersey shore for the first time and liked it enough to take a cottage there. He spent most of his remaining summers at the resort, which came to be called the summer capital. Homer painted Long Branch that same season. Two women in pale summer dresses, holding parasols, stand on the grassy bluff above the beach, with the surf and the bathers below. He also drew the resort for Appleton's Journal, which printed it in August 1869 as a two-page wood engraving, with a text remarking that on the beach, more than anywhere else, society throws aside its dignity. Homer still had the canvas in 1870, and it was sold at auction in Boston in 1874. By 1906 it belonged to the Philadelphia painter Robert Vonnoh, who handed it to a New Yorker named Sherrill Babcock in partial payment of a bill.