Deflection of narrative

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Franklin Kelly

You ask me for a full description of my picture of the 'Gulf Stream.' I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description.... You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who is now so dazed & parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his friends and home & ever after live happily!

Homer's reply makes it pointedly clear what his painting is not about. And it seems equally obvious that he was frustrated with his contemporaries' insistence on treating his pictures as easily read stories with clear conclusions to their narratives.

The Gulf Stream has continued to bother observers to the present day. Although it is unquestionably one of Homer's best-known images, historians have been reluctant to assign it a prime place in his oeuvre. It has been called one of the "least plastically satisfying of Homer's paintings" and faulted for its "illustrative deficiencies."(2) It has even been deemed "poorly painted, harsh in color, melodramatically overstated and terribly derivative in both its symbolism and its structure."(3) Although such judgments touch heavily on matters of aesthetics, the words illustrative and melodramatic also suggest that something in the paintings content continues to be found wanting. By suspending the story at an almost unbearably tense moment and leaving the question of this particular man's fate unanswered, Homer deflected the narrative of The Gulf Stream away from the specific and towards the universal. Whether the man lives or dies becomes emblematic of the ever-present possibility of death that all of us must face. By 1899 Homer had investigated many ways of accomplishing this kind of narrative deflection in his works, but his goal was always the same: to transform familiar or easily read subjects into ones capable of conveying more serious and profound meanings.

That Homer would be sensitive to the complex relationships between visual images and narratives (whether written, spoken, or imagined) is not surprising when one considers that he began his professional career as an illustrator working for Ballou's Pictorial, Harper's Weekly, and other magazines where pictures and texts were customarily linked.(4) But Homer's experiences during the Civil War - direct and firsthand as an artist at the front - began to teach him ways to work beyond both traditional pictorial precedents and typical narrative structures. Although Homer did create a few conventional battle scenes,(5) he soon realized that because the Civil War was different in its essential modernity from previous wars, an art that expressed those qualities would have to be different as well. His first Civil War painting, The Sharpshooter of 1863 (Pl. III), managed to be wholly unlike any usual depiction of the horrors (or glories) of battle. At the same time, it chillingly evoked the dangers particular to this war - namely the new and deadly role played by technology (in this case, a rifle capable of hitting a distant target). Here we see an early example of Homer's manipulation of narrative structure, for there is obviously a story at work here - the familiar one in which one enemy tries to inflict grievous hurt on the other. However, we are only allowed to glimpse one component of the story; we cannot see what the sharpshooter sees, or know at whom he is shooting (an officer? enlisted man? young? old?). By limiting the focus to the single figure, Homer intensified the image pictorially, and by restricting the viewer's access to additional elements of the story he heightened it thematically. The painting becomes not so much a record of a specific incident, but rather a broader statement of the consequences of war.

In Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg (Pl. IV), another early Civil War painting, Homer depicts a similar event from an opposite point of view. Here a foolhardy Confederate soldier has jumped to the top of a rampart to taunt the enemy; the consequences of his daring are evident in the tiny puff of smoke in the distance, which tells us that a bullet is speeding toward him. This is but one of numerous instances throughout his work in which Homer used a variation of typical or usual points of view to deflect a straightforward narrative reading of a picture.

In the years after the war, Homer turned his attention to subjects drawn from modern American life - such as croquet, tourist travel, leisure activities at seaside resorts, and schools. He investigated them in series of paintings, a practice that suggests that he felt these subjects could not be fully expressed in single images. On several occasions he created pictures that may initially suggest decipherable stories, but which in the end do not so easily yield their meanings. At first glance, The Morning Bell (Pl. V) seems to be simply a painting of young women on their way to their labors. On closer examination, however, we notice that the woman in the center is not only literally but also emotionally apart from the others. Through her dress and demeanor, Homer indicates that she is an outsider and not part of the same community represented by the compact group of other women. The small building in the background appears to be a schoolhouse, suggesting that she is the schoolmistress. In light of the fact that the American educational system underwent widespread changes in the years following the Civil War, and teachers increasingly came from outside local communities, The Morning Bell can be seen as an image about change and difference rather than as a genre painting about the supposed harmonies of country life.