Playtime by Frederick Webb Ross

In subject matter if not in style, there are resemblances between this painting and Georges Seurat’s famous A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, but even more so William Blake’s “The Echoing Green.” Here the spirit seems exuberant as the painting’s colored balloons, due perhaps to its “American” setting and youthful subjects. A gently sloping parkland ends alongside a pond occupied by a pair of swans, delighting a young child tended by a watchful nurse. Boys and girls of all ages manifest their play at different stages of childhood, save for two pensive young women: one looks out across the water toward adulthood, the other muses upon the hill.