2023 Malkin Lecture Series
American Everyman: Winslow Homer
November 6, 2023
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Hello I’m Rebecca Robertson the Adam R Fato founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory Welcome to our first event of the 2023 malcin lecture Series tonight we welcome biographer William R cross to lead us on an exploration of the fascinating artist Winslow Homer Homer was a keen
Chronicler of the Civil War and and of Gilded Age Society following the war similar to seventh regimen Artists Sanford gford and Thomas Nast both subjects of past malcol lectures in fact Homer’s studies of Civil War Camp life can be compared to the gford paintings on display here at the
Armory William AR cross is the author of Winslow Homer American passage which The Washington Post calls an exemplary biography and the New York Times named one of the best books of the year he has spoken widely and curated exhibitions in Europe and the United States so please now enjoy the program
This biography and there will be copies available for you afterwards if you uh don’t have one yet and would like one um this biography is the second Homer project on which I’ve been engaged the first was an exhibition that was conveniently scheduled to conclude just before the pandemic and that was in
2019 and it focused on the 11 years of Homer’s formation as a marine painter over that period he made pictures so captivating as in this beloved sentenal painting that they earned his work and immediate and deep affection across a broad swath of our country um from the
Point where he first exhibited a marine painting in 1869 to 11 years later um when he had the most productive season of his life in 1880 such is the familiarity of some of his pictures that today even Americans who do not know Homer’s name of which
There remain some often do know his work as a biographer my focus has been on Homer’s life for which in the absence of any spouse or children any Diaries few useful letters or other records his art has served as indispensable pH documentary evidence in examining that life and the
Breadth of art Homer made I hope that you may find resonance as I have with many aspects of our own lives and times today Homer’s story is rooted in his youth in Boston and Cambridge and in his understanding of the tectonic forces that shaped our Country forged it before
During and immediately after the Civil War and this building is one of the things that came out of that sense of this being the defining event um in our country’s history born in Boston to parents immersed in Seaborn trade even as a child Homer was keenly aware of the
Economic social and moral tensions roiling the country ranging from the panic of 1837 a year after his birth and arguably the first Global financial crisis to accelerating Annie Bellum division over the greatest moral question of the day slavery both his parents were devout Christians but even in its Faith his
Family was Riven with conflict his mother and her nuclear family members practiced their faith at Park Street Church where abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison preach the gospel of Freedom Homer’s father by contrast worshiped nearby in Boston at the Bowden Street Church led by another renowned preacher hubard
Winslow he declared that the best response to slavery was not agitation like that which in his view Garrison propagated but a calm and fixed rest of Mind Winslow seemed to believe that robust trade between Boston Merchants many of them seated in his pews and kindhearted people in southern ports
Would somehow lead to a resolution to say that Garrison disagreed with Winsley is putting it mildly he described Winslow as an apologist for slavery a prophet of Baal Homer’s father not only followed Winslow’s thinking closely but persuaded his wife to name their newborn son after the pastor and eventually to join her
Husband as a member of Winslow’s Church the house in which Homer was born in the waning years of the Jackson presidency is long since raised Ed but was set amid the Clutter and stench of Boston’s North End adjacent to wharves where Homer’s father an aspiring but failed Merchant inventor sought in vain
To find his fortune the Boston Homer knew as a child was hubbed to trade with ports across the whole Atlantic World beginning with the southern states of the US most importantly for the Homer family Alabama where in its largest city mobile three of his six paternal uncles settled two
Of them permanently exactly one year before Homer’s birth one of those uncles whom he knew well was Shipwrecked on the bamian island of alra which if you look carefully um you can see on the map and um it’s easier to see in the book years later in 1885 he
And his father would return to the remote site of that wreck as Homer first made pencil drawings and watercolors leading toward the Gulf Stream perhaps his greatest picture completed in the last decade of his life and the Lynch pin of the superb Homer exhibition the Metropolitan Museum hosted last
Year while his precocious older brother Charlie a brilliant chemist attended Harvard Winslow and his younger brother Arthur studied nearby at cambridge’s Washington grammar school winow appears to have dropped out to Begin work by the summer of 1853 just after he turned 17 his boss was a Boston lithographer John Henry Buford whose Downtown
Crossing Workshop depended both on plentiful capital for presses and costly Limestone blocks and un plentiful labor Buford hired apprentices for three purposes to grind down the blocks at left to draw appealing design designes on them at Center and then to print the finished products from theater tickets
To book illustrations to sheet music as we see from this cover for an 1850s top tune the wheelbarrow paa not heard on the radio recently two of the workshop’s three activities grinding and printing required fewer brains than Braun but the middle one drawing in cray on Limestone necessitated both long
Hours and delicate skill as a draftsman the Slender reserved Homer had that skill and that dedication and the encouragement of his mother who was herself a talented amateur painter about nine months into Homer’s apprenticeship for Buford another boy arrived in downtown Boston not far from Homer’s birthplace in the north
End this boy was similar in age to Homer but from Virginia his name Anthony Burns soon became famous both in Boston and Across the Nation Burns had escaped slavery by clambering aboard a ship Bound for Boston the man who claimed ownership of him hired a so-called slave catcher who
Abducted Burns in May of 1854 and delivered him to a waiting US Marshall on the courthouse steps there with the approval of Boston’s mayor and the president of the United States the young burns was tried for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 the brilliant oratory of his
Harvard train Council Richard Henry Dana who lived a ston throw from Homer failed to persuade the court in Chains Burns was marched down State Street before the eyes of 50,000 people onethird of Boston’s population the site and the story were catalytic prosperous Merchants even in the textile industry which depended on Southern
Contin would reflect as one wrote that we went to bed one night old-fashioned conservative compromise Union wigs and wak up Stark mad abolitionists the naked question emerged in fulfilling the demand of the man who claimed he own Burns had the United States itself inflicted a crime both
Against one teenage boy and against the core of its own ideals Homer leaves us no documents telling us what he thought of Burns’s trial or what he said of it to his neighbor the lawyer Dana author of 2 years before the Mast but in 1856 as the nation’s temperature continued to rise
He composed a lithograph depicting another act of violence this time on the floor of the United States Senate there shortly after Senator Charles suner of Massachusetts delivered his speech the crime against Kansas Preston Brooks a congressman from South Carolina beat him across the prince top Homer ran a
Quote from Brooklyn’s Henry Ward Beacher whose brother had been Pastor to Winslow’s mother at Boston’s Park Street Church the symbol of the north is the pen the symbol of the South is the bludgeon and then Homer began designing wood Engravings for Illustrated newspapers a medium which had been
Invented just 15 years earlier in London and had now come to to America his designs were distinctive in their rhythmic geometry humor and suspenseful narrative ambiguity making these prints was an even more collaborative process than lithography as they required not only a skilled draftsman such as Homer working
Both on paper and un tightly grained wood blocks but a second man a wood engraver who would complete the work by cutting into the block where Homer had drawn that process converted the artist’s two-dimensional design into a delicate relief dependent entirely on the two men’s skill in drawing line lithography allows tone and
Shading which is not possible with wood engraving all you have to work with is line the wood engraver’s work was exacting and earned for him about the same amount the draftsman earned at 23 Homer moved to New York where several of Boston’s other draftsmen had also moved along with their wood engraver
Colleagues accepting Fields trips in the US and two long sojourns in Europe Homer would live here in Manhattan for the following 24 years over the 27 years after that during which he was established as a resident of Maine he would return often to the city for visits of a few days to
A few months New York really was home for winow Homer and people in Boston and Maine don’t always like to hear that the city offered far better education for ambitious artists than Boston did and taught Homer a geometric discipline that remained core to his artistic methodology throughout his
Career as is evident in this watercolor of the 1870s Blackboard and in this scored sketch made about six years before he died both of these works on paper indicating the Precision of his artistic process as we will see shortly New York likewise grounded Homer in a practice of shaping visual
Narrative that he deployed against each medium within which he worked from painting on canvas or wo paper or ceramic tile to designing wood W Engravings to etching and lithography one example is this early watercolor in which Homer places himself with two actors each a brook trout just above their
Waterline he is invisible as we the viewers are but still present to observe a mortal drama one trout has leapt clear out of its element the Unseen fisherman has already acted he first enraptured the fish with his blood red fly and then firmly hooked it now fully Airborne the
Trout takes Center Stage IT seeks to shake free of the fly and its promise of a sure demise but also unknowing Tangles with a second blue fly hanging as a dropper at lower right within view of a second fish the behavior of both aquatic actors Bears consequence to themselves and to
One another Homer leaves the destiny of the lower trout a matter of suspense he conjures A Narrative of ambiguity in which the viewer places himself in empathy with the half submerged living creature on the cusp will it too perish at 25 Homer already had found ways to tell a story without words and
Even without visible human characters and to compel his viewers to care about the outcome of his tale by the time Homer made that watercolor his countrymen were already at War killing one another in the bloodiest conflict of our nation’s history the Brash brothers who published The Illustrated newspaper Harpers weekly
Needed draftsman with narrative skills such as Homer possessed they snapped up his designs he bore witness to the everyday drama of war the life of the ordinary foot soldier not the general offering complex but accessible compositions that connected the men at the front to lives back home he opens his narrative for the
Viewer to imagine the varied experiences of those men and to consider the outcomes of the story’s Homer begins in news from the war for example he tells a story of news traveling by letter conversation or even the sound of a bugle he hangs seven scenes from Telegraph wires tightly integrating them
Thematically and Visually the device pays Sly homage to the university building on Washington Square into which Homer himself had just moved and where wires still dangled from the ceilings on which Samuel Morse had hung them 20 years earlier for for his successful experiment inventing the telegraph Homer could sell a design such
As news from the war for about $100 the equivalent of $2,700 today in those days the value of an oil painting like this one was similar but Homer aspired to become more than an illustrator he wanted to be and to be known as a painter and for that he
Needed to paint in oil not watercolor which patrons and critics then viewed as an inferior medium with his success designing illustrations of life and Camp he turned naturally to that same subject in his first canvases often deploying his Keen sense of humor this privately held and
Rarely seen picture is one of the first two Homer ever exhibited two hungry Federal soldiers do their best to supplement their meager Army rations with some extra protein the barn with its teetering barrel-like water system reflects both Winslow’s attention to detail it appears in photographs of the site and his eye
For an element which repeats the form of the Barrel in the foreground a man of few words humer often endowed his pictures with names as multivalent as the pictures themselves and served as his own curator and publicist he paired this picture with another more meditative one home sweet
Home the meaning of home permeated the Civil War for all those who had a stake inet the enslaved who had no home the Confederates who believed that only through secession could they retain their home and the federal troops who fought ultimately for a larger Mission a reimagined home an America anointed by
God for his purposes when after the war Homer painted the picture for which over the following decade he was most acclaimed he placed in it a figure closely resembling his principal sponsor in the federal army his older brother’s longtime friend Francis Channing Barlo a Harvard graduate who entered the Army as
A private was badly wounded twice and ultimately became a general despite his youthful and Casual appearance he may not look casual at right but he was um Barlo serves here as an archetype of the cool Federal Officer at odds with the three ragged Confederate prisoners but the boy General is not at
The center of the scarred battlefield of Petersburg Virginia that Homer paints instead with geometric Precision a dashing redheaded Southerner appears wearing his faith on his sleeve and with his jacket and trousers slightly unbuttoned why and how Homer centers his painting here is a matter of inference decide when you read the book
Whether you agree with my inference this picture is an invitation to look longer broader and deeper let it ask you questions even and especially those that make you uncomfortable and because this painting is at the Met You can see it often spend time in front of it this
Picture um was hung with prisoners Homer often deployed pair pairs of figures in his pictures and sometimes pairs of pictures that he intended to complement and contrast with one another so this is a painting called the brush Arrow the same size and asking some of the same questions as prisoners
Asks but in a different way Homer setting is another field but without evidence of its history or indeed its location he includes two figures boys too young to have fought in the War perhaps Brothers they labor in the field because their father dead or injured cannot the improvised device the
Battleworn horse drags made mostly of brush is called a harrow the word uncommon today was then Rich in agricultural theological and philosophical meaning harrowing is an act of Promise almost but not yet ful fulfilled only after the soil is plowed can it be harrowed then only after it is
Harrowed can it be seeded just as Christ’s Resurrection awaited first his harrowing of Hell the Barefoot boys anticipate a future they cannot see but for which they prepare the brush Harrow subtly denied the possibility of the jingoistic interpretation prisoners permitted yet it speaks powerfully of the charged layered emotions of the country sorrow
Hope longing and lingering doubt although Homer’s Civil War paintings made him little money his 39 Civil War illustrations generated just enough cash flow that he could finally take his friend’s advice and venture to Europe as an exact contempory of his did at the same time Winslow would have agreed heartily with that
Contemporary Samuel Clemens that travel is fatal to Prejudice bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts broad wholesome charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one’s lifetime in Europe Homer encountered far
More paintings by M than the three all in Boston that could see in the US M’s Gleaners proved especially inspirational to Homer whose work made over those 10 months in England and France is primarily of farm life he also saw man’s pictures of which none had appeared in uh the US before
1877 here of an American Civil War battle waged in waters off the French Coast a magisterial work by Turner very importantly as we recognize in Homer’s own later response to Turner and paintings by his much better known contemporary Whistler who unveiled revelatory work he’d made in Chile at the exact moment in December
1866 when Homer arrived in London in time to see it upon Homer’s return from Europe after 10 months he settled into a seasonal pattern of travel leaving New York in the spring and summer each year he headed to Scenic regions to make field sketches generally in tandem with one or two fellow
Painters Homer garnered ideas for new illustrations on these trips and benefited from his friends artistic and Commercial Council much as he didn’t like to admit it both on the trail and in Greenwich Village he lived within a social context not in protean isolation Homer and his Pals returned in the fall
To their Studios with bulging portfolios of sketches they’d made that they hoped to convert to oil paintings which could justify the many hours of effort necessary to bring them to the Finish patrons expected until the mid 1870s Homer generated most of his income from the illustrations he sold year round but for
Him and other aspiring New York artists January through April was a time of special Focus that was exhibition season and the period each year for auctions which in the absence of the gallery system that developed in the uh late 1870s were an even more important method than exhibitions were for artists to
Sell their work on this seasonal cycle Homer was grounded for most of the year in his New York Studio awaiting warm weather travel to more picturesque settings in the late 1860s those included his first visits to Cape Anne which set Homer on the path to begin the work for which today he is
Best known one of the ironies of his career is that before 1869 this artist now so closely associated with Marine painting had never made one at 33 he exhibited his first oil of the sea which he titled Manchester Coast the critics hated the picture one writing that the
Most noticeable Point appears to be The Dashing of the Ocean Spray above the rocks but as indicated by Mr Homer it resembles the work of a boy who has dashed a spitball upon a newly pampered wall the review exposed the critics ample ignorance of Japanese Prince which had taught Homer not only
How to paint droplets in motion at upper right but other pictorial techniques such as a high horizon line a contrast between the distant View and the exacting description of the foreground and an asymmetric metcal compositional format that invites a bit of viewer vertigo the process whereby Homer likely
Began making his picture was not so different from how his predecessor Fitz Henry Lane had sketched the same subject from a similar vantage point just four years earlier singing Beach Manchester’s best known feature but Homer unlike Lane did not seek to replicate a cartographic reality instead he said when I have
Selected the thing carefully I painted exactly as it appears that is he considered his context deliberately constructed his frame as precisely as he set the objects within it and then and only then expressed what he observed he distilled down his idea of the beach to these anod gulls and
Granite Boulders which could be anywhere along the shore he in selecting them for his picture he challenged his viewers to find Beauty in the unremarkable and to make meaning from it within the tightly framed composition that Homer set he painted with exactitude particularities he pulled out of their usual context to convey their
Truthful appearance to him of course humer had to balance his instinct to innovate with his commercial reality in as much as he painted and Drew for money and needed to he sold his work in the present or if he couldn’t simply moved on to the next project with
Reviews such as this picture received unfair though they were it didn’t sell Homer never showed it again and crated up as best he could both this first Marine work and the sting of its reception but most importantly he did not give up and stuck with Marine painting 3 years later Homer moved to
The 10th Street Studio building a cultural hot house in the heart of Greenwich Village where he lived and worked for eight years until the spring of 1880 in 1873 surely encouraged by others at 10th Street he returned to capan journeying this time to Gloucester by summers’s end Homer had
Produced enough work in a medium just then winning new respect watercolor that he was willing to display 10 sheets albeit with such hesitation that he gave none of them titles or prices Homer adhered to a consistent pattern in the 25 watercolors which survive from his visit to Gloucester that summer all
Focus on children at play but not at leisure as they prepare for the maritime work that awaits them each of the sheets from this first exhibited Suite of watercolors is of similar size and appears to come from the same block of off-white wo paper Homer completed his
Work in a horizontal format on all but two of the sheets each composed like his wood Engravings of Stark geometric shapes also like his illustrations the sheets embed a narrative ambiguity that draws his viewers into the stories that Homer has begun inviting their completion in the eyes
And minds of those to whom he Appeals that ambiguity lies at top an undercurrent of fear and for boing Homer’s visit coincided with a catastrophic Gale which swept up the Atlantic to assault Gloucester and its people with unsparing merciless Force decimating the commercial fishing fleet upon which the town depended for more
Than 90% of its economy then as now the livelihood of fishermen depended on their taking mortal risk many of these watercolors focus on the act of seeing as Homer’s models explore the world around them including that part of the world which is submerged and invites closer viewing to which he also Woos
Us as these boys gaze into the shallows they do not see what we see a schooner destined for the rich but dangerous fishing grounds of Georgia’s Bank the gaping Ms of the warf sheds Beyond and the scaffold like Dereck to the right but what do these boys see that we in turn
Cannot Homer’s success selling his watercolor surprised even him and enabled him to give up selling wood Engravings to newspapers within two years by the summer of 1875 some of these early watercolors reflect his Affinity with black children such as this boy paired with an aging white veteran in his faded zoov
Uniform Homer marked the Centennial both with breezing up and with a pair of oils depicting black children some born after emancipation as well as a grandmotherly figure Homer’s younger characters this Sunday morning are both preparing for worship and learning how to read his El this model likely illiterate looks out
Of the picture frame and into a complimentary painting which Homer sets in the same space including in it an evidently unwelcome character the former Mistress of the plantation on which Homer’s black figures still live his diptic like pair in which sentiment and tension coexist is a classic example of Homer
Leading us into a purposefully open-ended drama Homer also empathized with indigenous women men and children including an evocative figure he painted the year following that first long summer in Gloucester the leader of the Monet people at the Eastern tip of Long Island he later painted others of the
First Nation around Lake St John in Quebec he saw himself in them perhaps as Outsiders making their way on Soil and Water they cherished and which their ancestors had known for centuries in the following six years Homer’s travels were with one exception entirely in New York state and
Especially in the Hudson Valley region and the Adera site of perhaps his greatest Upland painting a young man his red shirt embroidered with a heart follows an older man’s Direction with his eye but not his feet this par figures strikes a contrast by age height personality and meaning the two men
Allude to polarities we all feel between our American itch and our longing for home when Homer returned to saltwater in the summer of 1880 it was to Gloucester with a sense of purpose as he clearly had already planned a second trip to Europe which he sought to finance
Through the sale of a large portfolio of his pictures he knew his Market well enough and knew himself well enough to work almost entirely in watercolor at astonishing speed his Summer’s Harvest was about 100 new watercolors Homer lived with the Lighthouse Keeper and his family on 10
Pound island in the middle of Gloucester Harbor immersed in the magical intersection of land sea and sky his watercolors contrast strikingly with those he made 7 years earlier the children who appear on these sheets are at one with the rocks and rippled water around them their curiosity
Mirrors our own their joy in sumers Sun as natural as when we bask in their Delight today these boys seem utterly untroubled by the wo of the world that hung over the children Homer painted seven years earlier he also experimented that summer in painting a series of dramatic sunsets
Many of them with loose brush work and an appearance of abstraction until one looks more carefully at these compositions which reflect Homer’s characteristic attention to a methodology of geometrically ordered glory for example as Professor Robert Bor of the University of Iowa has demonstrated he often used an aspect
Ratio with the height of his finished sheet that was exactly 1.414 the Square t of two in this case that allowed Homer to locate a square to the right and a rectangle to the left with an implied Arc he positions his Schooner’s Mass just where the squares diagonals cross
The inscribed Circle then and now consciously and unconsciously the geometric Harmony the painter has invoked enhances View Delight in these watercolors and by their pleasing resolution helps to sell them Homer’s work of that long productive summer of 1880 did in fact Finance his second European trip as he
Hoped it would he spent 20 months in 1881 and 1882 primarily in the North Sea English fishing Village of color Coats near Newcastle where in a narrower pallet he made more ambitious larger watercolors his eye generally focused on the stolid women and children who remained unsure as their husbands brothers and fathers
Journeyed out to Fish by day again as in this watercolor he deployed a methodical geometric compositional system with overlapping squares and a circle within the right hand one that draws our eyes to the pivotal elements of his landscape such as the right knee of the seated woman at the precise horizontal Center
Line and the left edge of the toddler’s head the system reflects Homer’s confidence in an underlying order which he learned in his Youth and kept as a foundational touch Point throughout his career while he was in England his older brother Charlie had financed their parents’ purchase of a large chunk of
Prout’s neck a rocky promontory of 150 acres a dozen miles south of Portland Maine land at prouts was cheap and little developed primarily because fresh water was difficult to access but also because the local family which owned that land was only gradually recognizing that its highest use was for
Tourism not farming as the full occupancy of the next half dozen boarding houses and hotels have been demonstrating each summer seven years earlier wiso’s younger brother Arthur and his wife had honeymooned on the neck with an enthusiasm uncommon today they invited their relatives including Winslow to join them on their wedding
Trip now in 1882 Charlie paid both for the land and the construction of a new house including a studio on the second floor clearly anticipating that Winslow would live and work under their parents’ roof roof the project reflected a conviction that the three brothers shared that their parents needed to make a decisive
Change in their lives and needed Winslow to effectuate it for more than 20 years first in the Boston suburb of Belmont and then in Brooklyn their mother Henrietta and Father Charles had lived unhappily near relatives who overshadowed them she a main native likely championed the idea of relocating
To crows the name they gave their house reflected her recognition of the desperately last ditch nature of the move and her late in life desire to play a leading not supporting role in her new community they called the house the ark the plan made sense for their three
Sons too Winslow’s closest friends were migrating away from his base in Greenwich Village by the early 1880s he established relationships with dealers who were able to represent his work well without his continued residency in New York similarly Winslow’s two brothers one raising his family in Texas and the
Other living childless here with his wife in Manhattan saw prouts as both program and place to preserve family Unity despite tensions that might otherwise prove centrifugal that said the Homer’s plan set in Motion in mid 1882 ran into trouble almost immediately within months Winslow then 47 concluded that he could not sleep and
Work cheek by Jou with his parents he moved their newly constructed one and a half story stable to the lot next door and hired their architect to expand it as his home in studio second the impetus for the family scheme his mother became Gravely ill and less than 20 months after breaking
Ground on the ark died this left Winslow as the principal caregiver for his imperious widowed father despite Homer’s filial affection managing the old man would prove a considerable challenge for another decade and a half Winslow least enjoyed Prouds when his father brothers and other family members most most enjoyed
It the start of Homer’s 27 years as a main resident were ones of Staggering productivity for the first time he focused his brush on the profound and innate longing of all people for salvation and on a theme that would engage him another two decades of midocean wreck and rescue due in part
Perhaps the stories he heard on the deck of the Cunard steamship Parthia on on his way to England in march 1881 just before his mother’s death he achieved a triumphant sale of this picture for the then staggering sum of $2500 equal to more than $65,000 today and the purchaser was a
Remarkable New Yorker named Katherine wolf who was the richest woman in the United States he also made his first trip to the tropics traveling with his widowed father to the Bahamas the winter following henrietta’s death and then sailing to the historic city of Santiago
De Cuba for 6 weeks on his own he called the port a red hot Place full of soldiers the richest field for an artist that I have seen the city was the center of rebellion against this Island’s Spanish colonial rule to which Homer alludes with subtlety in his renderings
Of Santiago’s colorful but feted streets on the brink of explosion the drawings and watercolors he made that winter LED ultimately to his Monumental painting the Gulf Stream as mortal themes became Central to his work he composed the contrasting pendants of the herring net and the fog warning in which he sets a fruitful
Harvest of small fish that a pair of men catch close to shore against an uncertain outcome as a solitary figure pursues large fish far out at Sea a potential loss to his own life the following year through this mysterious picture Homer displayed his deep attention to the process of
Seeing not only the art of vision but the science of sight eight Bells is a pictor torial exploration of a singular existential question about the order of Nature and the place of each of us within it where are we the picture also makes a subtle but eloquent case for the role of systematic
And collaborative observation in answering such a question a decade later his contemporary Paul saan equal painter but a better Wordsmith when prompted by a similar EX ential question wrote that art is a Harmony parallel with nature Homer would have agreed and might have added that within the order of
Nature we Glimpse the greatest art of all made by the ultimate Creator in this context Homer’s interest in the emerging Art and Science of Photography is especially relevant and an expression of the unending itch for innovation of this son and brother of inventors this seems to be among the earliest
Photographs that Homer produced from one of at least three cameras he owned it relates closely to drawings and watercolors from exactly the same period he uh Winslow returned to Gloucester in the summer of 1885 probably in part to work on eight Bells but a second Factor might have
Been that prouts was especially noisy just then his 9-year-old nephew was one agent for the revocation of quiet another was directly across the street from his Studio a construction project he wrote r with much hammering today St James Church is a pillar of the Prout neck Community Homer’s recently widowed father was one
Of the founders but Winslow himself is not documented ever to have worshiped there or indeed anywhere else he wrote his brother’s wife that the church is of Great Value to the property and he was a great music enthusiast and doubtless would have enjoyed the singing he heard through the
Church windows that said his highly observant approach to all aspects of Life had one exception his formal religious practice surprisingly as the structure of his community continued to take shape in the mid 1880s in part through the recognition by others that prouts is indeed a fine place for summer cottages Homer Spirits
Inverted the new church and the houses springing up did nothing to help his period of immense productivity led to a slump that deepened to a depression for three years he painted almost nothing his pivot was through returning in 1889 to the Adera and to a farm he had visited twice
In the 1870s now the newly formed rustic Northwoods Club of which he became a member the Avid Angler would find there a welcome Counterpoint to prouts making the long journey 18 times over the remaining 21 years of his life for periods of a few days to three months at
And around the club Homer found conviction that the words of his favorite author and Anglo Scots physician were true everything Bears The Mark of order impressed upon it by the almighty hand Homer’s Newfound Delight in what he referred to as the balance wheel of Creation in which he immersed himself
Was as tangible as the creatures he painted Homer saw in awe the working out of an invisible but benevolent design as one Enthusiast wrote in the ad rondax with such symbols and manifestations of God around you need not go to the lettered page to learn of him the trout
Have sprung from the rippled nurturing shallows for a brief moment as has their prey at upper left which is in this form for just 24 hours that’s the power of observation Homer catches all of it in mysteriously ordered balance the fish the bug the lily pads and the air he too
Breathes he relishes the suspense of the moment and its extreme brevity for the three characters in his drama when he returned to prouts it was with a fresh engagement he had forged with the Glorious order of creation that awaited his witness he had developed a deepen sense of purpose and meaning both
In how he responded emotionally intellectually and spiritually to the unfolding stories he observed and in how he expressed that response visually in one of his first oil paintings after that catalytic summer of 1889 he grounded his drama Through The Eyes of a hunter at midwinter in awe at the power of the
Pounding Sea and the resilience of the craggy land on which and from which man and plant survive the following year he chose a woman’s eyes those of a neighbor to convey that same tale through a disciplined palet that nevertheless demonstrates his everchanging Coastal Vistas and he found that in some prouts
Neck pictures like those in the adex he did not need human characters to convey a compelling narrative his plot could hinge upon the rhythmic motion of the forces his own five senses observed the wet Touch of salt spray at left the surprising sight of pink in the curling wave at
Center and the Thundering sound of the roller at right are just three parts of an evanescent expression of another Creator it took many days of careful observation to get this Homer wrote about one of his pictures with a high sea and Tide just right his own creative process depended
On his humility before the work of as he would call him the great architect Homer maintained that same sense of patient awe as he witnessed the continuing drama of the natural order through the cycles of season Sun Moon tide and storm in most cases he marked
The human imprints on the land and see invisible but subtle form such as in the dark vessel at upper right similarly his Seascape with its competing forms of light from both the moon and Mr Edison look closely and you’ll see red anticipates his bold Caribbean picture of eight years later one of only
Two tropical oils Homer ever painted through the lens of the recently won Spanish-American War Homer Revisited motifs from sketches he had made 17 years earlier they depict an ancient Fortress within which Spanish Colonial police then prominently displayed their emaciated Cuban political prisoners art historians have suggested
That in the last two decades of his life Homer conducted a one-way Transit towards abstraction but in so doing they Overlook both the role of narrative grounded in his long experience as an illustrator and the visual social context of his life that underpins his Storyteller instincts prouts as an example consisted
Not only of rollers and rock but of buildings and the people who inhabited them like the structures in which they lived and the cliffs on which they stood his brothers father and nephews and neighbors shared with Homer the continual experience of main weather that conveyed its own suspense as he depicted over the
Remaining years of his life the patterns of harmonic order that he learned in his early 20s also remained with him throughout the last decade of his life an order made manifest through the continuing acts in daily life of natural creation and Recreation they invite our own observation as do Homer’s tributes to
Those catian phenomena and his late dreamlike responses to them including what is his most surreal and mysterious work whose underlying narrative is as impenetrable as it is inescapable undergirded by Homer’s rigorous geometry his sense of wonder did not mean that he was blind to vulner ability and
Death but rather that he believed in The Sovereign hands that this side of Heaven requires that we see through a glass Darkly in faith that one day we may see face to face so in Homer’s largest painting Fox Hunt it’s not the ravenous Crows with which he
Empathizes but the tired old Fox as like the fox his own s signature sinks into the snow at lower left and this too is working out of an order that is observed and attended by him who made all creatures Homer presents a tragedy for us but he does
Not give away its ending and he too cares about all that he the human creator has brought to life this painting was one of several that before his 60th birthday had one Homer a reputation for work that um people recognize then has a significance to American visual culture comparable to the contributions that
Walt whitmann Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain made to American Literature despite the recognition his work received Homer’s life changed little over all that life in his close observation his skillful hand idiosyncratic faith and tender heart for all he encountered Homer practiced the principles he learned in his
Youth he wrote that the life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life the sun will not rise or set without my notice and thanks on behalf of myself and this gentleman thank you for coming