Maizie under the Boughs (No. 16, Saugatuck, Michigan), 1915

​Frederick Fursman's Maizie under the Boughs (No. 16, Saugatuck, Michigan) is a study in the distorted visual perception that results when eyes abruptly transition from full sunlight to deep shadow. Forms are flattened and the colors of familiar things, from flesh to evergreen foliage, shift to unexpected hues. In the painting's featureless background, divided strokes of thick paint mimic the vibrating optical effect of midday glare. Thus the ordinary becomes strange in this interpretation of an otherwise commonplace subject: a young woman standing in the shade of a tree on a bright day. The painting suggests the emotional as well as physiological dimension of sight and the highly subjective nature of sense perception.

The female figure posed outdoors in bright daylight was a standard subject for American figure painters at the turn of the twentieth century. Under the influence of European modernist art, Fursman used the subject as a pretext for experimenting with abstract composition as he focused on the purely visual effects of color and light. Maizie under the Boughs is one of several paintings for which the artist posed a female model standing in or near the deep shade of woods. Most were made during the summers that Fursman spent in Michigan as an instructor and director of the Summer School of Painting at Saugatuck (now known as Ox-Bow), and they may have been intended to serve as aids in teaching outdoor figure painting.

A native of El Paso, Illinois, Fursman studied art in Chicago and Paris. He initially worked as an illustrator, eventually becoming a successful painter and a popular teacher in Chicago, Milwaukee, Kentucky, Colorado, and Winnipeg, Canada, in addition to Saugatuck.