Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Wendell Garrett

Winslow Homer, Prout's Neck, Maine, to his brother Charles Homer Jr., February 21, 1895

Well before his death in 1910, Winslow Homer was considered the most important artist the United States had yet produced. His wide-ranging subjects included genre scenes, war, landscapes, life in the black community, and man's eternal battle against the elements. His achievement and widespread popularity must be taken into account in any attempt to understand late nineteenth-century America and its art.

The sea in its many moods was a recurrent theme in his work. At first, the beach with gently breaking waves was a nostalgic setting for carefree childhood. His memorable early paintings done on the North Shore of Massachusetts show local children clamming, picking berries, romping along the wharves, and horsing around in dories. The pictures epitomize the spirit of freedom and prosperity of the post-Civil War North. The character of his seaside subjects changed dramatically after he moved for a year and a half to the English village of Cullercoats on the North Sea. There he experienced the wildness and unpredictability of the sea in winter - a force of nature of which man is a part but which is beyond his control. He observed the drama of a lifeboat being launched to reach a foundering ship while anxious women, bracing themselves against the wind, scanned the wild ocean.

When Homer returned to America in 1882, he continued to pursue the maritime subjects that had absorbed him in England. He went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to study and then paint lifesavers at work. The Life Line of 1884 and Undertow of 1886 were the results of events witnessed at Atlantic City. Both are highly ambitious paintings distinguished by their evocation of nature at its most ruthless. For a short time in 1884 Homer sailed with the herring fleet to the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland, producing a series of drawings and watercolors of fishermen in their frightening battle with the sea.

Once in residence in Prout's Neck, Homer took a fishing and painting trip almost every year to Florida, the Bahamas, or the West Indies in winter, or to the Adirondack Mountains or Quebec in summer. For fifteen years during his trips south he revised and refined his experiences of crossing the Gulf Stream in watercolors and drawings. Indeed, no other motif preoccupied him for so long. The Gulf Stream is Homer's most intense and self-expressive painting. It is an epic contemplation of death with a greater narrative content than any picture that had come from the artist's brush. Yet more than in any other work, he left the drama of the narrative unresolved. When asked to explain the subject, Homer replied, "I have crossed the Gulf Stream ten times and I should know something about it." He referred the inquisitive to Matthew Fontaine Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea of 1855. Maury wrote of the Gulf Stream, "There is a river in the ocean.... The Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is in the Arctic Seas.... There is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters."

Perhaps it was the profoundly private meaning The Gulf Stream had for him that caused Homer to write the director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia when he sent the painting there for exhibition in 1900, "Don't let the public poke its nose into my picture." When he said "I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description," he meant it.