s A Summer Shower - Hull Museums Collections

A Summer Shower

Perugini came to London in 1863 and was helped financially by Lord Leighton (1830-1896) in the launching of his artistic career. In A Summer Shower three young women in Greek-inspired costumes (fashionable in London at the time) are interrupted in their game of battledore and shuttlecock by the unpredictable British weather. They shelter under a large tree in a pose which recalls the Three Graces - a theme from classical antiquity. Perugini was famed as a painter of 'sweet idleness' and as 'a painter of womanhood in her most charmingly decorative aspect'.