Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article “Winslow Homer: His Melancholy Truth” by John A. Parks (©2006 by VNU Business Media).

The images in the paintings of Winslow Homer epitomize a peculiarly American 19th-century world. Through Homer’s eyes, it is a world in which people live in close contact with nature and natural forces, a world where landscape and ocean are viewed not as a paradise but as powers and presences that can be enjoyed and whose threats can sometimes be overcome. And, particularly in his later paintings, it is a world imbued with a stark and melancholy atmosphere.

In 1867, two of Homer’s canvases were chosen to hang at the Great Exposition in Paris. The artist spent 10 months in the city, which later proved to have a profound effect on his art. A large display of Japanese prints was exhibited in the same building as his own paintings, and the process of simplification that it revealed and the wealth of pictorial invention it provided made a deep impression on the artist. The influence of Japanese art on Homer’s painting was immediately apparent upon his return to the United States. The weakness of earlier compositions is replaced by a boldness and lucidity in which simple shapes are massed into powerful designs.

Although Homer’s work of the 1870s gained strength, the artist continued to paint his genre subjects: tourist scenes, schoolchildren, and farm life. It wasn’t until 1881, however, that he found the subject matter that would inspire him most. In that year, for reasons unknown, Homer went to England, where he elected to spend the summer at the town of Tynemouth on the coast of the North Sea. It is possible that he was searching for a town filled with the type of tourists and bathers that made his paintings of the Jersey shore successful back home. But Tynemouth was also a community of fishermen who wrested their livelihood from the dangerous and unpredictable waters of the North Sea. Moreover, the light and weather in that part of the world, so much farther north than Atlantic City, is much gloomier and more dramatic than that of the Jersey coast. It was there that Homer became enthralled by the dramas of the people who make their living from the ocean: the fishermen’s wives staring out to sea as they wait for their men, the launch of the lifeboat to rescue sailors from a foundering ship, the agonizingly fragile fishing boats being tossed on angry waves. Here at last was a subject matter that matched the artist’s deepest feelings. The dynamic and dangerous relationship between human activity and natural forces exposed in this setting would occupy Homer for many years to come. On his return to America he elected to leave New York and relocate to the rural town of Prouts Neck, Maine.

The legend of Winslow Homer is that he left New York civilization to become a recluse on the coast of Main for the last 25 years of his life. In reality, the property at Prouts Neck—which included a large, rambling hotel building—was purchased by his brother Charles for the whole extended Homer family. The artist also built a studio with an ocean view just yards away from the family house so throughout the summers he could enjoy the company of his father, his brothers and their wives, as well as the year-round guests of the many local people whose friendship he valued. Homer continued to travel frequently, spending parts of the winter in the Caribbean. But the artist always lived alone, and when he was working, which was the large part of most of his days, he could be extremely short-tempered when interrupted.

The sea outside his window now inspired the artist to create what came to be known as his greatest paintings. The Maine coast is extremely rocky and prone to monstrous gales that—at their most powerful—can whip up the waves to 40 or 50 feet. Screaming winds can rip across the breakers, creating long horizontal trails of spray. Homer rendered this sea with all the understanding of a painter who knows to simplify and synthesize. In paintings such as Eastern Point and Cannon Rock the construction of the water has been reorganized into clear graphic shapes and strong directional lines that echo the Japanese printmaking that had such a lasting effect on his work. The rocks in the paintings are massed into powerful, almost flat, designs and the brushing has become energetic, as though feeding from the physical strength of the ocean. These paintings take on an abstract grandeur that has justly made them famous. They remain, however, haunting evocations of the eternal power of the ocean.