Edwin Dickinson - Inland Lake

Although Inland Lake, 1919, is the darkest picture that Dickinson had yet painted, it appears to represent a happy band of women, children, and men—four in sailor's uniforms—at sunset. But the whimsical incident scattered through the picture is offset by a partially merged group or stack of three women to the right of the picture's center, a device not unlike the arrangement and effect of the figures in Interior and one that creates a similarly haunting presence, although embedded in a context that demands greater attention. He painted it two months after his discharge from the navy at war's end at the family cottage at Sheldrake, on Cayuga Lake, where, according to a journal entry written after a visit on leave in 1918, he had had a "happy time." Like The Rival Beauties, it was painted entirely from imagination.

Driscoll did not include it among the major symbolical paintings, and it received little attention until O'Connor and Ward each independently identified it as having symbolic characteristics. Ward points to the contrasting women, one in light-colored clothes welcoming the viewer into the scene, a second, in black, turning away to the left. He sees this pair as representing Dickinson's mother as both alive and dead, leading to a scene both present and remembered. A third woman is visible behind the brightly lit one, seen in right profile, but her contours, hues, and values fit the surrounding context so closely that she seems to disappear and may suggest the dematerialized aura of Dickinson's mother, felt in the surroundings rather than directly observed. Memories of his mother would have been aroused by his return home. By 1922 there is evidence that Dickinson had developed an interest in Marcel Proust, probably in Paris in 1920. While Proust's ideas must have influenced Dickinson's thinking in his later works, his initial enthusiasm was probably aroused because he recognized ideas in the French writer's explorations of memory that already played an important part in his own work.