Winslow Homer and the critics in the 1870s

Magazine Antiques, August, 2001 by Margaret C. Conrads

The incidents shared in this article form a small part of the complex story of Homer's experience in New York City during the 1 1870s. Throughout the decade, he endeavored to create a national artistic identity in paint, just as the art press labored to define one in print. Sometimes he was seen as successful in meeting the challenge and sometimes not. Nonetheless, he appears to have consciously tried to construct a professional career fully integrated with the art world and at the same time strived to express his own personal vision and interests. No doubt he sought acceptance for his art and no doubt he wanted to retain, even enhance, his position as the quintessential American artist, but to achieve this goal, he came to feel he needed to sequester himself from the turmoil of the New York art world and the constant cacophony of the critics. In 1880 he spent the summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and then in 1881 departed for England, where he spent almost two years, before settling permanently in Maine.

An exhibition entitled Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until September 9 and at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta from October 6 to January 6, 2002. It is organized by Margaret C. Conrads.

MARGARET C. CONRADS is the Samuel Sosland Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

(1.) See David Dearinger, "Prisoners from the Front," Rave Reviews: American Art and its Critics, 1826-1925 (National Academy of Design, New York, 2000), pp. 212-214. For the most comprehensive overview of the reactions to Prisoners from the Front, see Marc Simpson, "Prisoners from the Front," in Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, 1988), pp. 247-259.

(2.) Sordello [Eugene Benson], New York Evening Post, April 28, 1866.

(3.) See, for example, William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 19l1); p. 20. Downes's account of Homer's life and psyche was for many years used as the basis to assess his character.

(4.) For more on the American Pre-Raphaelites, see Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, 1985).

(5.) See, for example, James Jackson Jarves, Art-Hints: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (New York, 1855).

(6.) New York World, January 2, 1868.

(7.) On the response to the American pictures at the Paris Exposition, see Carol Troyen, "Innocents Abroad: American Painters at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris," American Art Journal, vol. 16 (Autumn 1984), pp. 2-29.

(8.) New-York Tribune, May 4, 1868.

(9.) There were also prominent writers, such as those for the New York Evening Telegram and the New York Herald, who remain unidentified. For the story of art journalism in New York City in the 1870s, see Margaret C. Conrads, "Winslow Homer and the Critics in the 1870s" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1999), chapt. 1.