Robinson with fins, jumping from dark swamp water. Homer was not, of course, the first "sporting artist" in America, but he was the undisputed master of the genre, and he brought to it both intense observation and a sense of identification with the landscape-just at the cultural moment when the religious Wilderness of the nineteenth century, the church of nature, was shifting into the secular Outdoors, the theater of manly enjoyment.
If you want to see Thoreau's America turning into Teddy Roosevelt's, Homer the watercolorist is the man to consult. Her catalogue is a landmark in Homer studies. It puts Homer in his true relationship to illustration, to other American art and to the European and English examples he followed, from Ruskin to Millet; its vivacity of argument matches that of the oil paintings.
Cooper has brought together some two hundred watercolors-almost a third of Homer's known output. It is a wholly delectable show, and it makes clear why watercolor, in its special freshness and immediacy, gave Homer access to moments of vision he did not have in the weightier, slower diction of oils.
He came to the medium late: he was thirty-seven and a mature artist. A distinct air of the Salon, of the desire for a "major" utterance that leads to an overworked surface, clings to some of the early watercolors-in particular, the oil paintings of fisher folk he did during a twenty-month stay in the northern English coastal village of Cullercoats in Those robust girls, simple, natural, windbeaten and enduring, planted in big boots with arms akimbo against the planes of sea, rock and sky, are also images of a kind of moralizing earnestness that was common in French Salon art a century ago.
In The Sharpshooter , a young soldier sits perched on a sturdy tree branch, one imagines quite high from the ground below. The barrel of his rifle steadied against a smaller branch, while his position seems a bit precarious without any true grounding for his feet.
Thick pine needles provide camouflage, while a hanging canteen suggests that the soldier has been in this position for quite some time and will probably remain there. What Homer has depicted was a new and devasting style of battle, the sharpshooter, made possible by advances in the design of the rifle.
As such, the notion of objectivity, so often associated with the Realist movement in America and Europe, finds true resonance with Homer's compositions.
Among the best-known of Homer's Civil War paintings, The Veteran in a New Field demonstrates the artist's profound understanding of the socio-historical moment in which he lived. A lone farmer harvests the seemingly eternal field of wheat with a single-bladed scythe. In the lower right corner, a Union soldier's jacket and canteen signal that this farmer is also a veteran of the recent Civil War. Painted shortly after the end of the devastating war and President Abraham Lincoln's subsequent assassination, The Veteran in a New Field is an early example of Homer's ability to weave subtle narratives into his paintings.
The single-bladed scythe was, by this time, an antique tool and meant to evoke notions of "the grim reaper" and allusions to the casualties of war, with some of the major battles including Gettysburg, had been waged in what had formerly been working farms. Additionally, the peaceful disbanding of troops after the war was seen as an embodiment of a democratic ideal, with references to the Roman legend of Cincinnatus who similarly returned to his farm after leading Rome to victory over her enemies, a common point of reference in Homer's time.
The combination of these elements has led historians such as H. Barbara Weinberg to consider the work, "a powerful meditation on America's sacrifices and its potential for recovery. The working figure of the soldier, painted in a relatively naturalistic style, suggests the hard labor of the solitary figure under the bright sun as he swings his tool across the wheat.
By comparison, the wheat reads as Impressionistic, even though this painting dates before the beginnings of the Parisian style or Homer's trip to France. It had been a central part of his artistic method virtually from his beginnings as a painter. One of Homer's most famous paintings presents modern viewers with a bit of a conundrum. It appears as a simple and idyllic scene with a line of young boys holding hands and running at top speed across a field of grass, rendered in an impossibly bright Kelly green speckled with wildflowers of various hues.
In the background, a small red school house rests below a patchwork sky of blue and white. The painting, titled "Snap the Whip! Yet, even Homer's most idyllic paintings transcend nostalgia as one looks closer to find signs of poverty, such as the children's tattered and ill-fitting clothing and bare feet. Art historian Edward Lucie-Smith described in his text, American Realism , "Childhood and the life of children took on a special significance in America in the years following the Civil War, and these images symbolized the will to rebuild and to make a stronger and more vigorous nation.
In an era full of racist imagery, Homer returned to Virginia in the s to begin work on a series of paintings depicting the lives of those newly freed from slavery but still struggling against the obstacles of entrenched bigotry. Instead of caricatures, he depicts quiet moments in the everyday lives of the newly freed African-Americans.
There is no underlying moralistic tale or narrative storyline that artist presents, but in a manner similar to Veteran in a New Field and Snap the Whip! Two women stand in an expansive field of cotton during harvest season, the efforts of their daily toil evident in the heavy load each carries. The time of day becomes a metaphor for the era, as Homer painted this series during the closing years of the Reconstruction Era, with the removal of federal troops from the South soon to follow with the passing of The Compromise of Yet, Homer is not didactic in his approach to these genre paintings.
Although painting in a symphony of pastel hues, offset by the soft white bulbs of cotton, this painting does little to provide reassurance for the fate of these women. Instead, in this and many of works of the era, Homer leaves the fate of the characters to find resolution in the minds of the viewer. Exhibited to critical praise, Breezing Up A Fair Wind shows a working father and his three sons on a catboat in the afternoon. He enjoyed isolation and was inspired by privacy and silence to paint the great themes of his career: the struggle of people against the sea and the relationship of fragile, transient human life to the timelessness of nature.
By about , however, Homer left narrative behind to concentrate on the beauty, force, and drama of the sea itself. In their dynamic compositions and richly textured passages, his late seascapes capture the look and feel and even suggest the sound of masses of onrushing and receding water.
They remain among his most famous today, appreciated for their virtuoso brushwork, depth of feeling, and hints of modernist abstraction. Weinberg, H. Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr. Winslow Homer. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Press, His most praised early painting, Prisoners from the Front, was on exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris at the same time.
He did not study formally but he practiced landscape painting while continuing to work for Harper's, depicting scenes of Parisian life. Homer painted about a dozen small paintings during the stay.
Although he arrived in France at a time of new fashions in art, Homer's main subject for his paintings was peasant life, showing more of an alignment with the established French Barbizon school and the artist Millet, then with newer artists Manet and Courbet.
Though his interest in depicting natural light parallels that of the early impressionists, there is no evidence of direct influence as he was already a plein-air painter in America and had already evolved a personal style which was much closer to Manet than Monet. Unfortunately, Homer was very private about his personal life and his methods even denying his first biographer any personal information or commentary , but his stance was clearly one of independence of style and a devotion to American subjects.
As his fellow artist Eugene Benson wrote, Homer believed that artists "should never look at pictures" but should "stutter in a language of their own. Throughout the s Homer continued painting mostly rural or idyllic scenes of farm life, children playing, and young adults courting, including Country School and The Morning Bell In , Homer quit working as a commercial illustrator and vowed to survive on his paintings and watercolors alone.
Despite his excellent critical reputation, his finances continued to remain precarious. His popular painting, Snap-the-Whip, was exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as was one of his finest and most famous paintings Breezing Up Of his work at this time, Henry James wrote:. Many disagreed with James. Breezing Up, Homer's iconic painting of four boys out for a leisurely sail, received wide praise. The New York Tribune wrote, "There is no picture in this exhibition, nor can we remember when there has been a picture in any exhibition, that can be named alongside this.
The same straightforward sensibility which allowed Homer to distill art from these potentially sentimental subjects also yielded the most unaffected views of African American life at the time, as illustrated in Dressing for the Carnival and A Visit from the Old Mistress From through Homer exhibited often at the Boston Art Club. Works on paper, both drawings and watercolors, were frequently exhibited by Homer beginning in A most unusual sculpture by the Artist, Hunter with Dog - Northwoods, was exhibited in Homer became a member of The Tile Club, a group of artists and writers who met frequently to exchange ideas and organize outings for painting, as well as foster the creation of decorative tiles.
For a short time, he designed tiles for fireplaces. Homer started painting with watercolors on a regular basis in during a summer stay in Gloucester, Massachusetts. From the beginning, his technique was natural, fluid and confident, demonstrating his innate talent for a difficult medium. His impact would be revolutionary. Here, again, the critics were puzzled at first, "A child with an ink bottle could not have done worse.
But his watercolors proved popular and enduring, and sold more readily, improving his financial condition considerably. They varied from highly detailed Blackboard - to broadly impressionistic Schooner at Sunset - Some watercolors were made as preparatory sketches for oil paintings as for "Breezing Up" and some as finished works in themselves.
Thereafter, he seldom traveled without paper, brushes and water based paints.
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