did there can only be guessed at. He evidently attended no schools,
haunted no galleries, made no friends among painters. He did some
drawings of people copying in the Louvre and dancing in the Students
Quarter--that is about all. The inclination of the illustrator was with
him rather than the prying instincts of an art student. What cared he
about Titian’s nobles or Watteau’s gallants or Chardin’s cooks! They
were not themes for him to conjure with. What to him was the _Ecole
des Beaux Arts_ or the _atelier_ of Couture! He was well past the
student age. He might have thought highly of the works of Millet or
Courbet had he studied them, but there is no hint in his work that he
had even seen them, though John La Farge said that Homer was largely
made by studying the lithographs of the men of 1830.
He came back to America and continued painting American subjects in his
own hard, dry, and hot manner. He did some shore themes at Gloucester
showing a first interest in the sea, some pictures of girls picking
berries or grouped in a country store, some sketches of boys swimming,
and men in the hay-fields--all of them showing an interest in country
life. But none of them was in any way remarkable. His “Sand Swallow
Colony,” with boys robbing the nests under the bank’s edge, is the best
type of his illustrations done at this time. It appeared in _Harper’s
Weekly_, served its purpose, and went its way without making any
perceptible impression upon American art.
In 1874 Homer made a first trip to the Adirondacks, as though searching
new magazine material. He found it in the Adirondack guides and in
hunting-scenes. In 1876 he went to Virginia, once more looking for
painter’s “copy,” and finding it in the American negro. Such pictures
as “The Carnival” and a “Visit from the Old Mistress” were the result.
It was a _genre_ interesting only in theme, for Homer’s workmanship
was still without any great merit or impressiveness. He flung back
to the American farmer for a subject, and then once more went to
Gloucester to do schooners and ships. In 1873, while staying on Ten
Point Island, in Gloucester Harbor, he had drawn some water-colors
notable for their high light and their absence of shadow. They seemed
to have some purely pictorial quality about them, but the illustrative
motive was still behind them. He did not give up work for _Harper’s
Weekly_ until 1875, and it was 1880 before he finally abandoned all
work for reproduction.
Up to this time Homer had not painted a single epoch-making picture. As
Kenyon Cox quite truly says, had he died at forty he would have been
unknown to fame. One might draw out the number of years and make them
fifty without extravagance of statement. Indeed, it was not until he
was sixty that he began to paint his pictures of barren coast and sea
upon which his enduring fame must rest, though before that he had given
indication in many pictures of fisherfolk, whither he was trending.
The blood of his sailor ancestors was coming to the fore at last, and
the sea was to be his main theme thereafter. If we believe in genius
that is born rather than made, then that, too, began to crop out in his
later life.
He went to Tynemouth, England, in 1881, and stayed there for two years
in close contact with the fisher people of the coast. This produced a
decided change in his art. The large, robust type of English fisher
lass, the strongly built sailor in oilskins, appealed to him and
remained with him. They were rugged, forceful people that well met his
hard drawing and severe brush. There, too, he began picturing the gray
sky and mist and sea of England. The heavy atmosphere that hangs like
a pall upon the North Sea in stormy weather caught his fancy, and the
gray-blue, gray-green waters gave him a new idea of color. The old
airless, brick-colored picture of his early days was never taken up
again. He dropped readily into cool grays, which in themselves were
perhaps no nearer a fine color-harmony than his earlier hot colors, but
at the least they were neutral and they were emphatically true of the
sea in its stormy phases.
Even Homer’s rigid method of painting began to break a little at
Tynemouth. He was working then in water-colors, and perhaps the
lighter medium lent itself more readily to a freer handling. His brush
loosened, his drawing seemed less angular, less emphasized in outline,
and his composition became more a matter of selection and adjustment
than of mere accidental appearance.
Mr. Cox, whose excellent monograph on Homer I am glad to quote,[7]
thinks that Homer quite found himself at Tynemouth, and points out
in the “Voice from the Cliff” his “rhythm of line” whereby he holds
the three figures together; but I am not sure that Homer did not get
a suggestion of that rhythm of line up in London town on his perhaps
occasional visits there. A hint of the types of the fisher girls,
the repeated lines of the arms and dresses, with the strength gotten
from the repetition, I seem to remember in Leighton’s picture called
the “Summer Moon.” Albert Moore, too, was turning out rhythmical
repetitions at that time and using models that remind us somewhat of
those used by Homer, though, of course, slighter and more fanciful. The
fisher girls in the “Voice from the Cliff” and the “Three Girls” are a
little too pretty to be wholly original with Homer, and yet it must be
acknowledged that such water-colors as “Mending the Nets” and “Watching
the Tempest” give warning of the coming man. The two women seated
on a bench in the “Mending the Nets” are young-faced, large-boned,
big-bodied types that have a sculpturesque quality about them; and the
“Watching the Tempest” throws out a suggestion of the Homeric sea that
is to be.
[7] _Winslow Homer: An Appreciation_, by Kenyon Cox, New York, 1914.
It was in 1884 that Homer finally went to Prout’s Neck, near
Scarborough, where he built a cottage on the shore and lived for the
rest of his life, quite alone, practically shut out from art and
artists, a recluse and a hermit yet within gunshot of a crowd. He
lived there much as Thoreau at Walden Pond, cooking his own meals,
doing his own gardening, raising his own tobacco, and rolling his own
cigars. The city had never been attractive to him, and from first to
last he preferred picturing the open spaces rather than streets and
houses.
It was from the isolation of Prout’s Neck that he began sending forth
the pictures that made him famous. One of the earliest was the “Life
Line” of 1884. It is a most dramatic illustration of a rescue at
sea--a girl being brought ashore by a life-saving-station man. The two
are swung in a buoy from the taut life-line and are being windlassed
through the great waves. The girl is unconscious, and, lying helpless,
catches the eye and the sympathy at once. That our interest in her
might be all-absorbing, the painter has hidden the man’s face by a
woollen muffler blown out by the wind.
Now the “Life Line” is very forceful story-telling with the brush, but
let it not be overlooked that it is story-telling--illustration. The
illustrator, with an eye for the critical moment and the appealing
interest, is just as apparent here as in “Snap the Whip” or “Prisoners
from the Front.” Winslow Homer, the pictorial reporter, is still
present. All along he has been answering the question: “What does it
mean?” He is still interested in that, but he is now beginning to
think about the artist’s question: “How does it look?” He is just a
little concerned about his form and his color, his composition, and his
general pictorial effect. They are not what they should be. The wet,
clinging garments of the girl reveal a large and very hard figure. It
is rigid in its outlines and stony in its texture, as though reinforced
for purposes of mechanical reproduction. The man is little more than so
much tackle and line, so ropelike is his treatment, and the enormous
hollow of the sea is merely a perilous background. As for color, the
picture is gray and would lose none of its fetching quality if done in
black-and-white. There is no love for color as color nor for painting
as painting here. The handling was evidently as little pleasure to the
painter as it is to us. It is as flat, as monotonous, and as negative
as the plaster on a kitchen wall. There is no suspicion of subtlety,
facility, or suavity in it. But when all that is said, there is a large
something left behind unaccounted for--a grip and knowledge and point
of view--that we respect and admire.
[Illustration: “Undertow,” by Winslow Homer.
In the Edward D. Adams Collection.]
A second dramatic and harrowing picture finished at Prout’s Neck
was “Undertow.” It is a rescue of two girl bathers by life-savers,
something that the painter had seen in the surf at Atlantic City. It
appealed to him. Why? Because it was beautiful in itself? Hardly that;
but because it had great illustrative possibilities. There once more
was the critical moment and the appealing interest. He could not
resist such “copy” as that. But now in putting the picture together
he is something more than a reporter of the fact. He embellishes the
fact to make it not only more effective but more attractive. He places
the figures on the canvas in a diagonal line that echoes the diagonal
of the incoming wave at the back. The lines give a swing and surge
forward not only to the sea but to the figures. The four figures are
locked in a long chain--almost a death-grip--with clutching hands and
arms and much use of angle lines. The angle lines repeat one another,
interlock, and run on until the whole group is of a piece--moves as a
piece. All this, of course, helps on the literary but it also indicates
a growing sense of the pictorial. The four figures begin to have the
monumental quality of a Greek pedimental group. The very sharpness
of their drawing and the hardness of their texture seem to help out
the plastic feeling. Homer seems rising to the difference between the
merely illustrative and the picturesque in design; but his color sense
stirs only sluggishly. The “Undertow” is pitched in neutral grays and
greens, and one cannot rave over it.
At this time the painter was spending his winter months not on the
Maine coast but down in the Bahamas or Cuba or Bermuda. While in those
places he did a great many water-colors--glimpses of palm and sand and
sea with white houses glaring in the sun. They were done with much
freedom, with a sense of blinding light, and some realization of color.
The quality of mere “copy” drops out of them, or perhaps was never
in them. They seem scraps of pictures, delightful glimpses of such
pictorial features as sun and shade and bright hues. It looks from them
as though Homer would finally emerge as a great painter and forget his
early point of view. And at times he does. But he has lapses, and the
bias of his early days returns to him.
From his Southern trips came the material for “The Gulf Stream” done
about 1886. Once more the painter has grasped the psychological moment.
A shipwrecked, starving negro is lying on the deck of a dismasted
schooner drifting in the Gulf Stream. In the shadowed water of the
foreground sharks are playing, beyond the boat are whitecaps and
running seas, in the distance is the suggestion of a waterspout under a
blue-gray sky. There is quite a display of color. It is in the sea and
sky, but its breadth is somewhat disturbed by being flecked with white
in patches. The picture is spotty in the foam and the clouds, and does
not sum up as a complete harmony. It seems as though color were not an
integral part of it but something brought in as an afterthought--color
added to design rather than design in color.
[Illustration: “Marine,” by Winslow Homer.
In the Emerson McMillin Collection.]
This is not the case, however, with the very beautiful “Herring Net,”
done at about the same time. It is another open-sea piece with
fishermen drawing into a boat a net full of wriggling fish caught in
the meshes. Herring, as they come out of the water, are brilliant in
iridescent hues, and no doubt that in itself appealed to Homer and was
the reason for the picture’s existence. The color at once became the
illustrative motive--became the picture. There is no feeling now of
color as an afterthought or as playing second part to the men or the
sea. The eye goes to the glittering herring at once. You comprehend
at a glance that this is a color scheme _per se_, and that the gray
men and the gray sea are only a ground upon which the iridescent hues
appear. Whether Homer realized how beautiful the color was, whether he
had any emotional feeling about it, or saw any fine pictorial poetry in
it, who shall say? In life he was disposed to deny such things. He said
to John W. Beatty: “When I have selected a thing carefully, I paint it
exactly as it appears.” Was that his procedure with the “Herring Net”?
Was it merely a color report of what he had seen? If so, he never saw
anything so beautiful again. It is his high-water mark as a colorist.
Homer was now producing his best-known pictures of fishermen, sailors,
and sea, such as the “Fog Warning” and “Eight Bells.” A literary
half-illustrative quality marks them, but perhaps we should not feel
this did we not know the painter had served time at that side of art.
They can stand as great pictures all by themselves, simply because they
are powerful characterizations of the sea. They have a driving truth
about them that sweeps away any demurrer on account of their method.
And in them all there is indication and suggestion of an expanding
pictorial sense. It came late, for Homer was fifty. It was never to
become a complete expansion, it was always more of a suggestion than
a realization; but it was a welcome addition and showed the painter’s
active and receptive mind.
While in Cuba Homer got the material for his “Searchlight, Santiago
Harbor,” which he put in picture form about 1899. There is a great
dark gun in the foreground--the dramatic catch-point, again--with a
suggestion of a mason-work fort around it. A search-light flares up the
sky; the sky itself is a gray-blue night effect. The arrangement is
large, big in simplicity of masses. The color is the usual gray-blue,
but there is a fine note about it, with a light and an air that would
count for little in reproduction but are very effective in the picture
itself. The canvas comes precious near being a great affair of form,
light, and air. It is as sharp in drawing and as flat and dull in
its surface painting as his other works. The naïve simplicity of the
brush-work is astonishing. Homer knows no tricks of handling, and will
resort to no glazes, scumbles, or stipples. He makes his statement so
unadorned that it seems almost crude or immature. And yet with these
shortcomings we still have an unusual quality of light, a rare night
sky, and a suggestion, at least, of fine color.
If the artistic sense seemed to be growing with Homer in his late
years, the early illustrative sense was not exactly dead or dying. From
first to last he knew how to characterize things--to catch and give
the salient features with force. Nothing he ever did shows this better
than his “Fox and Crows,” now in the Pennsylvania Academy. A red fox is
trailing through soft, deep snow and some crows are hawking and dipping
at him, as is their wont. Off in the distance is a glimpse of the sea
under a gray sky. It is composition, characterization, and illustration
all in one. Nothing could be more original or more truthful. From this
picture alone one might think Homer an experienced animal painter, but
it happens to be his one and only animal picture. It is practically
an arrangement in black-and-white, well massed and effectively placed
on the canvas. The blacks of the near crows are repeated in the far
crows and in the ears and forepaws of the fox; the white of the snow is
repeated in the sea and sky; the gray half-tones are echoed in the fox
and rocks and clouds. It is not only an excellent design fully wrought
but the effect of the skill is apparent in the convincing truth of fox
and snow and winter shore.
Finally came a series of pictures in which bird and beast and man are
left out and only the great sea and its fearsome fret on the shore
remain. “Cannon Rock,” done about 1895, shows a section of rocky coast
with blue-green waves pushing in and curling in white crests. In the
“Northeaster” a green-and-white wave is breaking over a rock and the
spray and foam are flung high in air. The “Maine Coast” is a wild day
along shore with rain and mist and spindrift and flying scud in the
air; there is blue-gray sky and sea, and far out the huge waves are
lifting and rolling shoreward with irresistible force. On the rocky
coast the foaming crests are falling amid split and shattered rock
strata. “High Cliff” and the “Great Gale” are variations of the same
theme.
[Illustration: “Fox and Crows,” by Winslow Homer.
From a copyrighted photograph of the painting, reproduced by courtesy
of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.]
Of course these pictures are illustrative in a way of the Maine coast,
but one does not think of them as such but rather as descriptive
or creative. They are reports of the power of the sea, wonderful
view-points of a great element. In that sense they are epic, tremendous
characterizations, all-powerful statements that startle and command.
You cannot get away from them. They fascinate, and yet are not
attractive in the sense that you would like to have one of them in your
drawing-room. They are elemental rather than ornamental. As Kenyon Cox
well puts it, you might as well let the sea itself into your house as
one of Homer’s sea-pictures. The picture would sweep everything before
it, put everything else out of key, make a black spot on the wall,
and continually irritate you with its harshness of method. From his
youth upward Homer seems to have had a scorn for the decorative. Charm
either in his personality or his art seems to have been a gift withheld
by the fairy godmother. He had the giant’s strength and with it he had
to accept the limitations of that endowment. The gentler side of the
sea--the flat summer plains of glorious color and light--he did not
care for, and even such features of the stormy sea as the flashing,
foaming crests he could not do except in hard, immovable form. The
crests in the “Woods Island Light” look like inlays of white marble
on lapis lazuli. The bubbling surge full of color and evanescent as
champagne was too charming, too lovely for him.
There were returns to the illustrative during his later years in such
pictures as “The Wreck,” “Kissing the Moon,” and in Adirondack scenes,
but by 1900 he had reached his apogee and thereafter changed little. He
was not to break out any new sails. Nor was there need of it. His great
ability and originality had been abundantly displayed and universally
recognized by both painter and public. Honors, enough and to spare,
were his. In 1893, at Chicago, he had been awarded the gold medal, and
everything that art societies could do or artists and critics could
say had been done and said. Up at Prout’s Neck, where he had shut the
door after him and kept it closed for so many years, these echoes of
the world’s recognition were received with indifference. Miss Mechlin
quotes from a letter of his in 1907:
“Perhaps you think I am still painting and interested in art. That is
a mistake. I care nothing for art. I no longer paint. I do not wish to
see my name in print again.”
He wrote that perhaps on one of his bad days, for he did take up the
brush again, but with no great spirit or effectiveness. In 1908 he was
seriously ill and quite helpless, but he insisted upon living on in his
lonely house with entrance forbidden to all but his brother’s family.
And there quite by himself he died in September, 1910. He had lived a
strange life, produced a strong art, and then died, like a wolf, in
silence.
One often wonders regarding such a character as Winslow Homer what
would have been the result if the strange in both his life and his
art had been eliminated. Would it have helped matters or would his
strength have been dissipated thereby? And wherein lay the strangeness
of Homer if not that he never inherited a single social or artistic
tradition nor would adopt one in later life? He made his own manners
and his own methods, in life as in art, with the result that in both he
was always a rough diamond. He never received anything of importance
by teaching or training. Culture of mind and hand, emotional feeling
or romance, were practically unknown to him. He was as far removed
from romanticism as classicism, and cared nothing about any of the
isms of art. We keep flinging back to an early conclusion that he
was a wonderful reporter rather than an interpreter, a reporter who
saw unusual things in the first place and reported them with unusual
characterization in the second place. The result was about the
largest nature truths of our day. Truth was his avowed aim--the plain
unvarnished truth. He never intentionally departed from it.
Homer is an excellent illustration of what a man cannot do entirely
by himself. With his initial force and his keen vision he could make
a very powerful report. Had he been educated, taught restraint and
method, given a sense of style, schooled in decorative value, he might
have risen to the great gods of art. But perhaps not. Even pedagogues,
in their late years, begin to doubt the worth of training. It might
have ruined Winslow Homer. Yet, nevertheless, it is the thing that his
admirers always feel the lack of in his pictures. He has no comeliness
of style, no charm of statement, no grace of presentation. To the last
he is a barbarian for all that we may feel beneath his brush
“the surge and thunder of the ‘Odyssey.’”
Unfortunately, much of Homer’s barbarism of the brush lives after
him while his splendid vision and stubborn character are in danger
of being interred with his bones. He himself has become a tradition,
a master to be imitated, for though he founded no school and had no
pupils, a great many young painters in America have been influenced
by his pictures. The majority of these young men have concluded that
Homer’s strength lay in the rawness and savagery of his method; they
have not gripped the fact that his compelling force was a matter of
mind rather than of hand. An imitator can always be counted upon to
clutch at a mannerism and neglect a mentality. So it is that many a
young art student of to-day, with just enough imagination to conjure up
an apple-blossom landscape is painting with the crude color and gritty
brush of Homer, thinking thereby to get something “strong.”
What a dreadful mistake! A surly surface of heaped-up paint _minus_
the drawing that is Homer! And the juvenile error of supposing that
the knowledge of a lifetime can be picked up and handed out by a
glib imitator in the few hours of a summer afternoon! The attempt
presupposes art to be merely a conjurer’s trick--a supposition that
history does not sustain.
Homer cannot be counted fortunate in his followers. Accepting a surface
appearance of strength as the all-in-all of art, they have abandoned
grace of form with charm of color--flung the decorative to the winds.
We are now asked to admire this or that because it is “real” or
“just as I saw it,” or “absolutely true”--as though such apologies
in themselves were sufficient reasons for fine art. But Homer long
before he died withdrew to Prout’s Neck and abandoned his fellows of
the brush. He no doubt thought them quite hopeless. Perhaps there was
reason behind his thinking.
Of course he cannot be held responsible for their paint pretenses. His
rank as a painter will be made up from his own works. By them he will
be judged and they will surely stand critical estimate. For nothing
more virile, more positive, more wholesome has ever been turned out in
American art. He had something to say worth listening to. And he said
it about our things and in our way. No one will question for an instant
the Americanism of his art. The very rudeness of it proclaims its place
of origin. Reflecting a civilization as yet quite new to art, a people
as yet very close to the soil, what truer tale has been told! The
fortitude of the pioneer, with the tang of the unbroken forest and the
unbeaten sea are in it.