'Driftwood', Winslow Homer's final painting

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

Homer had begun to paint marine subjects as early as 1869, with the benign Rocky Coast and Gulls.(11) By 1873 he had already become concerned with what wood become his greatest subject - the power, sensuality, and mortal danger of the sea evident in his wood engraving of that year entitled The Wreck of the Atlantic - Cast Up by the Sea [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. A young woman in her negligee, a victim of the wreck, has been washed ashore. A bearded mariner, his face hidden by his sou'wester, stares at her alluring form. Incongruously, he holds a gaff, as if he had just hauled in her body like a large fish. In this work Homer contemplates death and the sea, as he did many times again during the thirty-six years leading to Driftwood.

Fishermen dressed in oilskins, their faces either averted or completely hidden, began to appear frequently in Homer's work during his sojourn in England in 1881 and 1882. Whether working in their boats, relaxing on shore, or depicted as rescuers, they wear their foul-weather gear regardless of the weather The fisherman is portrayed not as an individual but as an archetypal masculine figure - an alter ego for Homer himself. Growing older, there are even times when the aged fisherman still dreams of the love of a young woman [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. IV OMITTED].

In 1890, with Sunlight on the Coast [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. IX OMITTED], Homer began a final series of marine pictures that concentrates on the powerful rolling waves themselves in all their might and beauty. Through the painter's eyes we now stand face to face with the drama of the eternal sea, with eternity itself. With these late coastal pictures, Homer became one of the few American painters to triumph in his old age.(12) Lloyd Goodrich recognized this when he wrote of Driftwood as "one of [Homer's] richest works in color...one of his most concentrated and powerful paintings" and concluded that Right and Left and Driftwood "revealed a mastery and richness such as appear in the culminating works of great artists."(13) The Prout's Neck pictures, with their painterly fluency and their dark heroism, represent a victory, rare in the history of American art, of experience over age.

Beam writes of Homer's "one last burst of creative energy," while calling Driftwood "almost a summation of his years at Prout's."(14) The picture is that and more, for it not only synthesizes Homer's feelings about the sea and its people, but also draws together several strands from his other archetypal subject of the later years, the Adirondack wilderness. The tree trunk in the foreground of the painting has been mistaken at times for a mast or spar, but its irregularities and stumps of branches clearly identify it as a log, perhaps a pine that got away from the Deering Mill at Saco, Maine.(15) Homer was very much aware of the logging industry, as seen in numerous Adirondack compositions showing either logs on their way down the river [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. V OMITTED] or the ravaged forests themselves. The log thus serves as a reminder of the painter's lifelong use of trees as important symbols in his works. In The Initials (1864)(16) a young woman carves the initials of her lover into a tall, upright tree; in Trooper Meditating beside a Grave (c. 1865)(17) a soldier stands against a background of dark, bare trees. During the 1870s Homer's leafy trees frequently offer shade and protection to young people. In a wood engraving entitled Spring Farm Work - Grafting (published in Harper's Weekly on April 30, 1870), a youthful farmer, perhaps a veteran, grafts new branches onto his trees with loving concern. As Homer's preoccupation deepened during the 1880s, trees increasingly come to symbolize the painter's ruminations on life and death, as in Plate VIII and Hunter in the Adirondacks of 1892.(18) In these pictures brutal young woodsmen stand on the trees they have killed with the brazenness of those who have slaughtered the local game. Aging but still vital pines stand tall in Old Settlers of 1892,(19) while a fallen tree echoes the death of a fawn in The Fallen Deer [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. VI OMITTED]. In the watercolor of 1894 shown in Plate VII, an aging woodsman (the counterpart of the old fisherman in Driftwood) stands beside a majestic rotted tree similarly near death. The woodsman looks up at the tree and touches it gently Like the figure in Driftwood, he holds a rope - a tool that represents his labors as well as reminding us of his own fraying link to life itself. Thus, like the relentless, eternal sea, the fallen tree in Driftwood unmistakably represents the decline of the artist's health and virility and his coming death.