'Driftwood', Winslow Homer's final painting

Magazine Antiques, July, 1996 by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr.

Downes wrote that "what proved to be [Homer's] last oil painting was a canvas called Driftwood, painted in the fall of 1909....It represents some wood drifting to the shore, a man in oilskins and sou'wester going out into the water with a rope to secure it."(1)

Downes records that Homer promptly sent the picture to M. Knoedler and Company in New York City, his dealer during his later years, and Knoedler's records confirm receipt of the picture on November 30, 1909. Roland F. Knoedler wrote to Homer that day that he was "delighted" with the painting and asked, "why not let us have a few more like it? It is an absolute sure 'seller,' besides being an excellent picture." (2)

Knoedler proved to be right regarding the paintings appeal, for he sold it the same day to the first collector who saw it.(3) The buyer was Frank Lusk Babbott (1854-1933), a public-spirited civic leader and art collector who served for many years as a member of the Brooklyn, New York, board of education and as president of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (now the Brooklyn Museum).(4) His taste, like that of his contemporary Charles Lang Freer, tended toward the Oriental, the atmospheric, the refined, and the cerebral. Thus it is easy to understand why Driftwood immediately appealed to him.

When he received the picture, Knoedler was confused about its title, asking Homer in his letter of November 30, "In your letter of the 22nd instant you say that the title is Drift Wood, [while] on the back of the stretcher is Spoon Drift. Which will we christen it?" Homer had given this new painting two titles in quick succession. The first, Spoon Drift, referred to the fine mist blown from the top of waves. As a title, it would have drawn attention to the sea itself as Homer's subject, and parenthetically to the skill he still possessed at the age of seventy-three in rendering the subtlest nuances of water and atmosphere. Homer must have responded promptly to Knoedler's inquiry, for it was as Driftwood that the painting was logged in on December 4 at the Century Association in New York City, where it was exhibited briefly, following the painter's long-time practice.(5) This, the second title, draws our attention from the gray sky, rolling waves, and dark ledges to the foreground, where a massive log is wedged between the rocks. Standing next to the log, close enough to touch it, is the bent figure of a fisherman, dressed for foul weather and holding a rope in his hands. His unmistakable purpose is to capture the heavy, water-logged prize. His posture suggests that he is old and weak, while nature - represented by waves, rocks, and the tree trunk itself - appears powerful and unyielding. The task of capturing the driftwood, although enormously difficult and doubtful of success, seems not impossible. The outcome, which Homer leaves uncertain, will depend on the skill and courage of the protagonist, as in such earlier paintings as The Life Line of 1884,(6) and The Fog Warning (Pl. III).

Homer's energy and productivity flagged during his late years, especially after the turn of the century. In 1900 he painted three major oils, but only one each in 1901 and 1902, none in 1903, three in 1904, and none in 1905 or 1906. In 1907 he finished just one oil painting - a reworking of an earlier composition - and in 1908 he again did none. In May 1908 he suffered a stroke, which left him partly disabled, and in August he wrote to Downes, "I have given up painting for good."(7) Amazingly, however, he was back at work in December 1908, and in January 1909 he finished his penultimate work, Right and Left (Pl. II). This is an unusual picture in Homer's oeuvre in its abstracted composition and its still-life quality but not in its subject matter - the contemplation of death. As a number of scholars have pointed out, this was a constant theme, perhaps the constant theme of his late work.(8) If Right and Left deals with the very instant of death, representing man as an unthinking animal facing oblivion, Driftwood is about man as a thinking and courageous human being. After finishing Right and Left Homer was well enough to travel to Florida. Apparently, however, he did no further work until November, when he began Driftwood. He excitedly wrote his brother Arthur of the new picture: "I have little time for anything many letters unanswered & work unfinished. I am painting."(9)

Philip C. Beam has written that after finishing Driftwood, Homer "knew that he wood never paint again."(10) Beam heard this from a reliable source, the painter's nephew Charles Lowell Homer Jr., and although there is no way of confirming what went on in the artist's mind, the painting itself supplies persuasive evidence that Homer conceived it as a valedictory effort It comes as close to being a self-portrait as anything Homer painted, and it brings together in a powerful summation several of the major themes of his art.

It is now well recognized that Homer was one of the most autobiographical of American painters. One senses that the pictures of Civil War infantrymen and sharpshooters, rural schoolboys, and youthful farm hands shyly courting all represent self-portraits of the artist in differing guises. Like a novelist, Homer created a fictional world drawn from his hopes, fears, and dreams. His themes became more profound after he left New York for a simple outdoor life in Prout's Neck, Maine, when he was in his forties. Now he painted himself again and again as a hunter, Adirondack fisherman, and above all as a mariner - an old fisherman on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, a sailor in mid-ocean, or a rescuer of women endangered by the sea.