The Courtship of Winslow Homer - letters reveal relationship with Helena de Kay

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002 by Sarah Burns

A hand injury prevented Homer from leaving as planned, and he was still in New York at the beginning of June when de Kay sent him one of her flower paintings as a present, perhaps as a peace offering. Homer's letter of June 3 thanking her reveals how much he still cared for her:

My dear Miss Helena, I have just found your picture. I think it very fine. As a picture I mean, not because, etc. and as I have just returned from Prospect Park where I have been with Mother all day, looking at the flowers, it must be fine if I think so.

I thought of you once today and picked out a little girl (one of about fifty) as looking as you perhaps looked--She could outrun all the others, and gave the teacher the most trouble--and I doubt if she went to Sunday school, but she was nice.

My hand is all well now, so I shall leave town immediately. I am very grateful to you.

Sincerely yours,

Winslow Homer

The next year, 1874, Homer revisited the history of his courtship in a series of paintings that dealt ironically with thwarted love. The Rustics (private collection) and Rustic Courtship (private collection) are variations on the theme of the social barriers that finally contributed to Homer's defeat. Cosmopolitan and well to do, Helena de Kay enjoyed a life of privilege that may have alienated the more plebian Homer. (20) In the first painting the young farmhand holding a rake and a small bouquet of roses stands below the open window that frames a housemaid with a feather duster. She is unattainable, for though the window is open the walls are thick. In Rustic Courtship the farmhand stands directly under the window and much closer to the wall. This only emphasizes the housemaid's superior position. Another painting, the now unlocated Course of True Love of 1875, dealt directly with humiliation. It depicted a farm girl chewing on a straw and sitting in a field with her back to her suitor after some argument. As one newspaper described it, "Her lover, a manly looking fellow, is twisted about, embarrassment peeping from every feature and even from the toes of his cow-hide boots." (21) The fact that Homer recast de Kay as a housemaid or a blowsy country lass is indicative of his desire to distance and protect himself from painful memories.

Girl in the Orchard (P1. V), by contrast, suggests that at some level Homer never ceased to regret his failure to make de Kay his wife. This is a sequel to Waiting for an Answer (cover and P1. III), painted two years earlier. It is the same scene with the crucial difference that the young farmer has disappeared, leaving the hesitant, downcast girl still dangling her straw hat, its ribbons stirring gently in the breeze. A rooster and two chickens are her only companions. Homer kept this painting all his life. He hung it in a cottage he had built in 1901 in Kettle Cove, Maine, which was part of the Homer family compound by the sea. Although he rented out this house and never lived there himself, Homer thought of it as the place where he would end his days. He declared that "Other men build houses to live in, I build this one to die in." (22)