During the summer of 1916 George Bellows and his family vacationed in Camden, Maine, and Bellows began to experiment with plein air portraiture in which he attempted to integrate the human figure with the outdoors. He produced two nearly identical versions of a monumental portrait of his wife and two daughters that summer: My Family and Study of Emma and the Children (now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Although the relationship between the two is unclear, it is generally assumed that the Boston work is a preparatory study for the Gallery’s painting. Both versions are unfinished, possibly because Bellows could not resolve the relationship between his subjects and their surroundings, a problem that he addressed more successfully later that summer in the plein air portrait Emma in an Orchard (now at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, FL). While Bellows was certainly influenced by the French impressionists, most notably Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, the emphasis on geometric forms in My Family suggests that he was also keenly aware of the example of Paul Cézanne.