Winslow Homer and the critics in the 1870s

Magazine Antiques, August, 2001 by Margaret C. Conrads

Throughout most of the 1870s, subject matter still predominated as the deciding factor in a painting's success. However, as European paintings and young European-trained artists increasingly infiltrated the New York art scene from 1875 on, technical and stylistic issues rose to the fore. As this intricate weave of competing interests played out in the final years of the decade, Homer's unmistakably homegrown subjects vied for attention with his innovative use of light, color, paint application, and composition.

When Homer returned to New York from a year in France in late 1867, the critics were confounded by his new work Low Tide exhibited at the winter exhibition of the National Academy of Design of 1869, generated heavy criticism. The writer for the World simply noted that it was "unworthy of any collection of works of art, even that which is sometimes made by the second hand furniture dealer." [10] D.O'C. Townley was more expansive in outlining his problems with the painting, but what concerned him and other critics the most was that Homer had created the composition by layering broad stripes of color, rather than with conventional linear perspective. He wrote:

How an artist of acknowledged worth in a certain field of art, could permit this horror to leave his studio is simply incomprehensible to us. Here we have three grand horizontal layers of color--like rock strata.... On the wet sand, and on the dry sand, and further out toward those mysterious white places, are children bathing or about to bathe.... Many of these are charmingly posed little pictures in themselves. [11]

Such adverse reactions may have been the reason Homer withdrew the canvas prior to the end of the exhibition's long run [12] and ultimately cut it up. All that remains of it today are On the Beach (P1. VI) and Beach Scene (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection). [13] Perhaps, as Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. has pointed out, Homer divided the canvas in order to preserve the "charmingly posed little pictures." [14]

If the critics perhaps induced Homer to mutilate Low Tide, they may have also incited him to meet their challenges. For instance, after Manners and Customs at the Seaside (whereabouts unknown) and Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (cover and P1. III) were roundly condemned for their subject matter when they were shown in 1870, Homer responded with The Country & School, which was widely praised for both its style and its subject, which was considered "thoroughly national."[15] The primary complaint about the images of 1870 had been that they depicted either unimportant or, worse, unsavory aspects of contemporary life. The young women in Eagle Head were described as slaves to fashion or en deshabille, [16] and their public display of such private gestures as wringing out a dress or revealing bare legs were deemed inappropriate. Homer's palette and the broad swatches of unmodulated paint also distressed the critics. The reviewer for the World wrote on April 24, 1870, that the picture was an "atrociously-col ored bathing scene," with the sea "a pool of ice cream" and the girls "exceedingly red-legged."