Leisure

About

Leisure, time free from work, has always been bound up with class. Edo Japan called its theatres and pleasure districts the ukiyo, or floating world, and printmakers such as Utagawa Kunisada made images of actors, courtesans and cherry-blossom outings for the townspeople who enjoyed them. In France, Antoine Watteau invented the fête galante, elegant couples idling in parkland, as in Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717).

Industrial society created weekends and seaside holidays, and painters followed the crowds. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) gathers friends on a restaurant balcony above the Seine, and George Bellows plunged into the smoke of a private boxing club in Stag at Sharkey's (1909). Photography took both sides of the class line: Slim Aarons photographed the rich lounging by pools in Palm Springs, while Martin Parr's The Last Resort (1983–85) shows working-class families crowding a shabby beach near Liverpool.