Summer Sports

Two women in elaborately ruffled Gibson-Girl dress recline on a hilltop, holding long kite strings that arc across a wide pastoral sky. In the far distance, tiny male figures are also tethered to the same sweeping lines—visually reduced, by the geometry of the composition, to mere objects on the women's strings. The joke is social: the kite lines double as leashes, and the men at their ends are as helpless as toys. Gibson rehearses here his signature argument that fashionable American women hold absolute, effortless dominion over their suitors. The title Summer Sports clinches the irony—the men are the sport being played.