Deflection of narrative

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Franklin Kelly

Breezing Up (Pl. VI), still one of Homer's best-loved paintings, was much admired when it first went on exhibition in 1876. One of the work's chief appeals lies in the way it so faithfully re-creates the experience of a pleasant day's sail. A critic for the New-York Tribune wrote on April 1, 1876:

No eye that delights in salt water, and in the sight at least of a sail-boat bounding over it...but must admit that there is not a picture in this exhibition, nor can we remember when there has been a picture in any exhibition, that can be named along side of this.

On the face of it, the canvas tells a very simple narrative, but behind the seemingly straightforward image lay some three years of work, suggesting that the artist had something more in mind. Examination with infrared reflectography (see Pl. VII) reveals that Breezing Up underwent many alterations: a fourth boy, as fully finished as the other three, was seated in the bow (where there is now an anchor); in the distance there were two other boats in full sail, both also highly finished; the tiller and rudder were in a different position; and the tiller was originally held by the man, not the boy seated at the stern. Artistic considerations were no doubt in part responsible for these changes (the deletion of the background vessels, for instance, serves to concentrate the viewer's attention on the foreground boat). However, the key to understanding Breezing Up, and Homer's alterations to it, lies in the date of its completion, 1876, the year of America's Centennial.

Marking the first one hundred years of national existence, the Centennial was an occasion to look into America's future as well as its past. One writer observed that Americans "are animated by a new hopefulness...the nation is only in its childhood."(6) Another wrote, "We are young, strong, inventive, and quick-witted.... When the Centennial is over, the whole nation will feel refreshed and encouraged."(7) Americans were not only acutely aware of how young their nation was but also of how far it had come in just one hundred years, and how far it promised to go in the future. Homer's replacement of the boy in the bow with an anchor - the symbol of hope - and, especially, the transfer of the helm from the old man to the boy ("whose bright eye evidently sees such enormous horizons")(8) transforms the canvas into a symbolic embodiment of the optimism of the Centennial.

On many occasions Homer painted pictures in which the interactions between figures are interrupted, disrupted, or in some way made unclear. Sometimes he accomplished this by showing them looking at something that is not within the space of the picture itself, as in the striking Promenade on the Beach of 1880 (Pl. VIII). One appreciative, but puzzled, critic observed:

On the beach walk two women, both young, and looking out with such expressions in their faces as suggest romances. Mr. Homer probably painted this peculiar phase of nature [the dark sky] first, but he has made a poem of it by introducing these figures.(9)