Famous Watercolor Paintings
“I am not at all abiding that I apperceive what Americanism absolutely is,” the art analyzer Elisabeth Luther Cary told readers of The New York Times in 1936, “but so the case stands: Americanism absolutely is, and, in art, Winslow Homer is its abundant exemplar.” There was little disagreement. His actual name seemed fabricated for the job, bisected able-bodied Greek adventure, bisected captious Yankee Calvinism (his parents were aggressive by the Congregational pastor Hubbard Winslow). During his lifetime, he managed—not afterwards strategizing—to be both accepted with the hoi polloi and admired by his peers. Afterwards his afterlife in 1910, his croaking seafarers and abnormally accurate ocean sprays were a arch amid ancient storytelling pictures and the 20th-century alternative for animate form. In 1995, aback the Civic Arcade of Art, in Washington, D.C., accumulated a absolute retrospective, Homer was still “America’s greatest and best civic painter.” He gave us our best selves: Currier and Ives afterwards the kitsch, addition with a animal face. To John Updike, he was artlessly “painting’s Melville.”
This affectionate of flag-waving is no best fashionable, or alike comfortable, in an art apple appetite to be all-around and in a country breadth arguments over what counts as “real America” become nastier by the day. So it is not hasty that “Crosscurrents,” the better Homer appearance in added than a division century, positions the artisan as allotment of a transnational Atlantic world, addition from the Caribbean (where he fabricated beaming watercolors of bluff fishermen and bright inlets) arctic to Quebec (leaping landlocked apricot and Aboriginal Nations guides) and east to the English apple of Cullercoats (heroic fishwives aerated by wind). In amid lie his accustomed stomping grounds: the battlefields of Virginia, the bouldered bank of New England, the autumnal Adirondacks.
The map appropriately devised about follows the contours of the Gulf Stream, which is additionally the appellation of the aboriginal Homer painting purchased by the Metropolitan Building of Art, a co-organizer of the exhibition, forth with the Civic Gallery, in London. Indeed, The Gulf Stream (1899) is the centerpiece, a brand for how the curators—Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount in New York, Christopher Riopelle in London—envisage Homer for the 21st century. No best an answer of American innocence, he is adapt as a artisan of empiric conflict: Arctic against South, man against sea, attributes red in tooth and claw.
Painted backward in Homer’s life, The Gulf Stream nods aback to his beforehand dory-in-distress pictures, such as The Fog Warning and Absent on the Grand Banks (both 1885). A sailor is afloat on abundant seas in a baiter that has absent adviser and mast, but the ambience is not the dejected gray of the Arctic Atlantic—the sea is blue, the sailor is Black, and the home anchorage called on the ascetic is Key West. Sharks allotment through the beginning water, and in abode of bloodless halibut the accouter is broadcast with red-and-green sugarcane coiled like snakes. In the distance, two accessible resolutions to the ball boost into view: on the left, a full-rigged address and achievement of rescue; on the right, a waterspout and assertive death. The sailor sees neither—he is attractive to the side, aloft the angle of the canvas. We can’t see what he sees, and we accept no way of animate which way the wind blows.
The painting was never universally loved. It took seven years to sell, and was acquired by the Met in 1906 alone below burden from Homer’s aeon at the Civic Academy of Design. Early admirers complained that the baiter was too tubby, the cartoon inelegant, the adventure band unpleasant. Added contempo assemblage accept begin the action excessive, like Sharknado afterwards the humor. Aback it was apparent at the Knoedler Arcade in 1902, some changeable visitors, afraid about the sailor’s fate, prompted the arcade to ask for clarification. Homer wrote back:
You ask me for a abounding description of my account of the “Gulf Stream.” I affliction actual abundant that I accept antidotal a account that requires any description. The accountable of this account is comprised in its appellation …
I accept beyond the Gulf Stream ten times & I should apperceive commodity about it. The baiter & sharks are alfresco affairs of little consequence. They accept been absolute out to sea by a hurricane. You can acquaint these ladies that the adverse negro who now is so addled & parboiled, will be rescued & alternate to his accompany and home, & anytime afterwards animate happily.
This annoyed account annoyed no one, and The Gulf Stream has enjoyed a active activity in bookish agitation anytime since, adduced as affirmation of the artist’s thoughts on animal frailty, Plessy v. Ferguson, the afterlife of his father, or the agreeableness of painterly amphibian disasters.
But for added than a century, The Gulf Stream has additionally been that rarest of things—an accustomed masterpiece by a admired artist, blind in an eminent institution, and featuring a Black hero. It “broke the cotton-patch and back-porch tradition” of representation, Alain Locke wrote in 1935. And if white art historians spent decades cautiously blank the implications of bark color, amid Black artists The Gulf Stream has been a touchstone. Derek Walcott identifies the sailor with the hero of his ballsy composition of diasporic Blackness, Omeros. Kerry James Marshall overhauled Homer’s genitalia to accomplish his own Gulf Stream (2003), in which the baptize is shark-free, the baiter is yar, and four Black abstracts relax amid the bang and a bang box. Marshall does add a Homer-worthy catechism mark: the blatant braiding that forms the painting’s accessory beleaguer is burst on one side—an adumbration of emancipation, perhaps, or of a bedevilled ship.
The Homer of The Gulf Stream is both added carnal and added cryptic than the Homer of little red schoolhouses and sou’westers. And what the 90 or so paintings and watercolors accumulated in “Crosscurrents” accomplish bright is that the best arresting affection of his art was never straightforwardness; it is his adroitness for application beheld absorption to authenticate the banned of vision. We can see what is accident but not what will happen. He is the adept of the cryptic outcome, which additionally makes him the adept of the cryptic moral: Accept in the ship, and The Gulf Stream is a assignment in forbearance; accept in the waterspout, and it is a assignment in futility.
The aperture of “Crosscurrents” coincides with the advertisement of a new biography, Winslow Homer: American Passage, by William R. Cross. Both endeavors aim to brace our compassionate of an artisan already accustomed to best museumgoers, and both face the aforementioned hazard—a mulishly afraid subject. Not for annihilation was Homer accepted as the “Obtuse Bard” in the account of one of the artists’ clubs he belonged to. His belletrist could be communicative about fly-fishing, but were attentive to the point of blackout on questions of adulation and art. How do you re-create the abutting activity of an artisan who did not allocution about art?
Homer’s alien activity is accepted able-bodied enough. Born in Boston in 1836 to an old and intermittently affluent Yankee family, he was apprenticed to a lithographer afore ambience out on his own as a freelance illustrator. By 1859 he was in New York City, bartering the new mass-market periodicals like Harper’s Weekly with bubbling scenes of dancing cadets and ladies benumbed sidesaddle. If his analysis was a bit Gumbyish and his faces were little added than masks, his assets had abundant brio to survive the ossifying adaptation into copse engraving. Aback Harper’s beatific him to Virginia to awning the Civil War, he begin his ability in carefully celebratory affected life, accessory to “the accustomed bottom soldier,” Cross notes, “not the general.”
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910). Sharpshooter, 1863. Oil on canvas. 12 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (31.1 x 41.9 cm). Portland Building of Art, Maine, Gift of Barbro and Bernard Osher (1992.41). Photo address of Meyersphoto.com.
He had ambitions. In New York he abounding life-drawing classes and accustomed basal painting instruction. He advised how-to books and prints of European paintings. He abstruse to set people, places, and things on geometric scaffolds, giving the best accident of capacity a faculty of abstract order. (A admirable 1877 watercolor of a adolescent woman pointing out geometric abstracts on a blackboard feels accidentally personal, with his signature placed as if chalked on the slate.) Not a accustomed aback it came to color, he relied heavily on Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s 1839 book, The Laws of Adverse of Colour. Like artists his age on both abandon of the Atlantic, he adopted spatial account from Japanese woodblocks, and was active to the attending of photography (he redrew Mathew Brady photographs for Harper’s, and endemic cameras himself).
The copse block of a Union analyzer perched in a timberline that appeared in the November 15, 1862, affair of Harper’s bore a new acclaim line: “From a Painting by W. Homer, Esq.” The affair was contemporary for a magazine—equipped with scope sights, sharpshooters represented a atypical blazon of warfare, able of hitting a ambition hundreds of yards abroad from a buried position—but it was a appropriate accountable for a painting. War paintings were about stagey action scenes. Analyzer is added like a brand painting of a man at work; his assignment aloof happens to be killing. Years later, Homer wrote that the arena was “as abreast annihilation as annihilation I anytime could anticipate of in affiliation with the army.” Analyzer is abutting with anticipation—the compactness bisect of rifle, branches, and animal limbs is aces of Franz Kline—but it is absurd to say if it shows a hero or a villain.
Prisoners From the Front (1866), a almanac of the Civil War acclaimed for its amusing allegory, fabricated Homer’s acceptability as a austere artist. There was the northerner exuding “the address of a activity activated by principle,” his acquaintance Eugene Benson wrote in the New York Evening Post, adverse the “audacious, reckless, arrant adolescent Virginian,” the “bewildered old man, conceivably a spy, with his artful look,” and “ ‘the poor white,’ stupid, stolid, helpless.” Easy-to-read typologies were allotment of his illustrator apparatus kit, but actuality they acquired a aseptic gravitas.
When the account was apparent at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, in Paris, Homer fabricated his aboriginal cruise to Europe. He landed in Liverpool and may, as Cross suggests, accept lingered in London, demography in the compensation of Turners and the Raphael Cartoons. Or maybe not. Neither there nor in France did he leave a almanac of what he saw or what he anticipation about it.
In New York he was clearly clubbable, adopted to the Aeon Affiliation and the Civic Academy of Design—then the city’s arch exhibition venues—while still in his 20s. In the summers he headed to the country with friends: the White Mountains, the Hudson River Valley, the Adirondacks. He antidotal bodies at comedy (the baby and admirable croquet paintings of 1866), but added generally he antidotal them at assignment out of doors. He additionally catholic to the aloft Confederacy, painting scenes of African American life.
Critics generally took Homer to assignment for his brusque blush and asperous paint, which tugged at the edges of attention, abasement the illusion. His blah capacity were begin uncouth, his delineation of a Black family’s dovecote “slovenly.” And yet his pictures adored the eye in means that abashed the best adult of onlookers. Henry James, who would accept adopted scenes of Capri, wrote that admitting Homer chose “the atomic aesthetic ambit of backdrop and civilization; he has advisedly advised them as if they were aesthetic … and, to accolade his audacity, he has acutely succeeded … Our alone complaint with it is that it is damnably ugly!”
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910). Snap the Whip, 1872. Oil on canvas 12 x 20 in. (30.5 x 50.8 cm). The Metropolitan Building of Art, Gift of Christian A. Zabriskie, 1950 (50.41). Photo address of The Metropolitan Building of Art.
What adored him was attentiveness. Alike aback the accountable is banal, his band is unexpected, absent from cliché by incident—the appropriate crumpling of a sail, or the aberrant breach of a ripple. Each commodity has a specific weight, as able-bodied as a faculty of basic motion; it feels as admitting aggregate is about to appear apart. His acclaimed arena of barefoot boys playing, Snap the Whip (1872), is abnormal in assuming the moment afterwards the break, rather than the moment before.
These qualities erupted with beginning accuracy aback he angry to watercolor in 1873. The aboriginal account he anytime apparent in New York had been a watercolor, but the average was still disdained for its affiliation with changeable amateurs (including Homer’s mother, an able annual painter). So he baffled oil painting, but his oils somehow consistently feel like assignment in a way the agile, ablaze watercolors do not. In watercolor, the abatement of ablaze on a child’s bald aback evokes an accident rather than an effect.
Returning to England in 1881, Homer acclimatized in Cullercoats, a fishing anchorage with bad acclimate breadth artists specializing in the “peril at sea” brand gathered. Alive mainly on paper, he bare aback and decluttered his compositions, allotment his fisherfolk with brace majesty.
It was additionally in watercolor that he recorded the leaping ablaze of the Caribbean. Already advised as a sidenote, the Caribbean watercolors aggregate about a third of the works in “Crosscurrents.” This accent is a antidotal for accomplished omissions, and builds a beheld and conceptual ambience for The Gulf Stream. (Also, they are artlessly beautiful.)
The aftermost third of his activity was spent mostly in Prouts Neck, a blooper of acreage on the bank of Maine breadth his ancestors had acquired property. He affiliated to travel—willingly for fishing, below agreeably for the assorted ceremoniousness that came his way. Curiously, for all his adulation of wilderness, he never went further west than Chicago. “While his compatriots were block Native Americans beyond the plains of South Dakota,” Daniel Immerwahr writes in the archive for “Crosscurrents,” “Homer was painting awkward watercolors of dogs, deer, and trout in the Adirondacks.” The pictures were not consistently so awkward (especially for the deer), but they fabricated attributes present, not as an alarming panorama in the address of Frederic Edwin Church or Albert Bierstadt, but as an affectionate encounter. In the amazing watercolor A Good Pool, Saguenay River (1895), a huge apricot hangs in midair aloft the inclement waters, while from a canoe below, a aerial fiber loops through the air like a pen flourish, catastrophe in the red fly that has aloof bent the fish’s cheek. Aggregate is connected.
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910). A Good Pool, Saguenay River, 1895. Watercolor and graphite on wove paper. 9 3/4 x 18 7/8 in. (24.7 x 47.9 cm). The Clark Art Institute. Image address of the Clark Art Institute, clarkart.edu.
It was at Prouts Neck that Homer antidotal the late, abundant affairs of sea and bank that kept his acceptability animate amid modernists fabricated acquisitive by narrative. In these, he fabricated accurate the address in his bold agenda about The Gulf Stream: Boats and angle and all “outside matters” accept been dismissed, abrogation light, and weather, and tides—motion afterwards animal motivation, time afterwards end.
In the bosom of advertisement all the things he abhorred about Homer’s art, Henry James paused to admit: “There is about commodity one brand about him.” For a aeon and a half, bodies accept been answer that affection in altered ways. Homer’s vaunted Americanism was one. In this line, he was acclaimed as an autodidact, chargeless of affiliated affectedness or any “hint of Europe or of Asia.” Helped forth by his reticence to wax agreeable in writing, his “down-to-earth honesty” devolved into a affectionate of wholesome stupidity. As the Civic Arcade of Art babysitter Nicolai Cikovsky put it in 1995, “It has not been accepted to attention Homer’s bookish and moral accessories as cogent aspects of his aesthetic enterprise.” Beforehand writers topped off their portrayals with an about caricatural masculinity: His appearance was “manly,” his capacity were “virile,” and alike the chichi watercolor was, in his hands, “pre-eminently a man’s art.” About this backward and reportedly active man, his aboriginal biographer enthused, “Like the men of Viking blood, he rises to his best acreage in the accent of the hurricane.”
This Thor–meets–L. L. Bean appearance bears little affinity to the adult and strategic, if enigmatic, Homer presented in the new adventures and the “Crosscurrents” archive essays. The authors accent virtues acceptable to address to us now: his absorption in depicting Black people, alive (not aloof ornamental) women, and ecology systems. In befitting with today’s scholarship, the archive considers the exhibit’s artworks as vectors of amusing and political forces. Immerwahr examines Homer in ablaze of America’s territorial and bread-and-butter expansion, allurement whether the adorable Bahamian watercolors ability be “an allurement to empire”; Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw address into Homer’s difficulties adjustment ascertainment with accustomed acumen in his depictions of Black Americans; Stephanie Herdrich uses The Gulf Stream as a jumping-off point to analyze battle and bloodshed in Homer’s career; Sylvia Yount maps a abundance of Homer scholarship; and Christopher Riopelle surveys Homer’s accord to Europe.
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910). The Turtle Pound, 1898. Watercolor over pencil, 14 15/16 x 21 3/8 in. (38.0 x 54.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Sustaining Membership Fund, Alfred T. White Memorial Fund, and A. Augustus Healy Fund (23.98). Photo address of the Brooklyn Museum.
Cross’s book, by contrast, is a hefty, acceptable “life of.” Not decidedly absorbed in investigating systemic ability and privilege, Cross draws out aspects of activity that may accept ample added carefully in Homer’s own mind, acknowledging afterwards contempt, for instance, Homer’s businesslike access to business. Summers in the country may accept offered “solace … afterwards the agony of wartime,” as Herdrich writes, but they were additionally a way to accrue sketches of the affectionate of brilliant scenes collectors admired to buy. Aback paintings didn’t sell, he kept bribery with them, whether for his own amusement or to second-guess the market, and he was not aloft painting the aforementioned account alert (there are two versions of Snap the Whip, one with eight children, one with nine). “I will acrylic for money at any time. Any subject, any size,” he told a banker in the 1890s.
Cross additionally gives abundant amplitude to religion—both the apostolic debates over bullwork that confused New England during Homer’s adolescence and the afterwards admeasurement of accustomed theology, the acceptance that all-powerful adjustment was appear through the accustomed world, which underlay abounding of the books, both accurate and spiritual, in Homer’s library. If he can be apparent as a proto-feminist and proto-environmentalist, his affidavit were altered from our own.
There are still huge holes, including the nature, or alike existence, of Homer’s adulation life. Was his affection burst by the artisan Helena de Kay (of whom he antidotal a attenuate account in a Whistlerish mode)? Or by the agent Albert Warren Kelsey (with whom he airish for a affectionate photograph in Paris)? Cross alerts us to the theories, but warns that there are alone “a few shreds of evidence” of any specific animal dalliance. And while it is adamantine to disagree with Herdrich’s ascertainment that Homer seemed “to bacchanal in depicting healthy, young, Black bodies bright in balmy baptize and sunlight,” the aforementioned ability be said of his attitude against fish.
Art-historical queries run into agnate asleep ends. Homer was in Paris at a acute moment in the history of Impressionism, but the all-important issue—what did he see and aback did he see it?—subsides into speculation: “Surely,” writes Riopelle in the “Crosscurrents” catalog, “Homer rushed to Manet’s pavilion.” “One cannot brainstorm that he would accept absent it,” Cross concurs. The account chugs forth on a clue of “would haves” and “must haves.”
“The best absorbing allotment of my life,” Homer wrote aback abnegation to abetment an ambitious biographer, “is of no affair to the public.” That account is extraordinary—an apparent aggravate (what is the best absorbing part?) followed by a airtight door. It feels abnormally familiar. That advance and pull, like the alternation of accuracy and caliginosity in his biography, additionally haunts his pictures.
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910). Afterwards the Hurricane, Bahamas, 1899. Watercolor and graphite on wove paper. 14 5/8 x 21 3/8 in. (37.2 x 54.2 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection (1933.1235). Image address OF The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, N.Y.
The backwardness of Homer’s bodies has generally been remarked on. They about-face their back, attending over their shoulder, blind their appearance with angled hats and falling hair. It has been appropriate that he was aloof bad at faces, but he could acrylic them with adroitness aback he capital to. The addiction is too assiduous not to be purposeful, and it has a audible effect: Instead of attractive at people, we end up attractive at bodies attractive at things we cannot see. Soldiers attending through burglarize sights; sailors attending to sea. Wading accouchement angle over to attending below the water’s surface. Sometimes, as in the agitating Waiting for Dad (Longing) (1873), we accept a clue about what they are attractive for, admitting not what they absolutely see. In Two Guides (1877), a gray-bearded abundance man (he could be a archetypal for Gabby Johnson, the apostle of “authentic borderland gibberish” in Blazing Saddles) extends his arm and basis feel to point at … something.
It is perennially surprising, aback you appear beyond Homer paintings on a building wall, to ascertain how baby they are, mostly in the two-by-three-foot range. (Kerry James Marshall’s Gulf Stream occupies 12 times the breadth of Homer’s.) This calm scale, however, was “not affected for the drawing-room,” his acquaintance Kenyon Cox wrote, but for grander, added ample venues. Homer capital bodies to “stand off,” and derided the addiction of aptitude in as “smelling” a picture. He already asked that a painting be afraid in a arcade window so it could be apparent “properly from the adverse ancillary of 5th Ave … as it is antidotal at the ambit of 60 feet.” In Prouts Neck, he explained, “I adhere my pictures on the high balustrade of the studio, and go bottomward by the sea seventy-five anxiety away, and attending at them.” Embedded in the adumbration of a wave, below his signature on The Gulf Stream, is the antidotal bulletin “At 12 anxiety from the account you can see it.”
From that distance, Homer’s acclaimed brusqueness is smoothed out and the apparition of amplitude deepens. He explained that the “first shark” was 15 anxiety continued and 30 anxiety advanced of the boat. But if you angle aloof two anxiety away, it looks like the sailor could ability out and pet it. Alone from a ambit does the amplitude amplitude out. Up abutting you ability see how the ambush was played, but you lose the magic.
Homer may absolutely be painting’s Melville, not because of the authorization he held, but because he could charge so abundant absorption and admiration into a distinct breath.
This commodity appears in the May 2022 book copy with the banderole “Winslow Homer’s America.”
* Lead image: Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910). The Gulf Stream, 1899. Oil on canvas. 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (71.4 x 124.8 cm). The Metropolitan Building of Art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906 (06.1234). Photo address of The Metropolitan Building of Art.
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