Winslow Homer

1836-1910 • American • Painter • Realist

"If a man wants to be an artist he should never look at pictures." - Homer

Homer was an exceptionally taciturn man whose rare comments about art, such as the one quoted above, might sound more doctrinaire than he probably meant them to be. His point here was that an artist should look to nature, rather than tradition or convention. That is what he did in his own career, which began with drawing for magazines, especially Harper's Weekly. During the Civil War, Homer reported on life just behind the frontlines, the wounded soldier writing home, and poignant moments, such as that shown in his oil painting Prisoners from the Front (1866), in which a group of Rebel soldiers surrenders. Homer went to France after the war and came home with a lightened palette and a preoccupation with leisure activities such as the French IMPRESSIONISTS were painting. Yet his concerns also seemed particularly American and often focused on the new generation: Snap the Whip (1872) shows young, barefoot boys holding hands in the familiar game of that name. They go faster until momentum breaks the chain-of friendship, innocence, or whatever one chooses to read-and throws each child, separately, to the ground. He painted schoolhouse scenes, and a lovely teacher whose model was supposed to have been his romantic interest. However, his career, and subsequently his style, was interrupted in the 1880s by a two-year sojourn on the British sea coast, prompted, some think, by disappointed love. Others incline toward attributing his departure to dismay with the character of America during the Gilded Age. In England, the power of the sea and human vulnerability in the face of nature absorbed him. On his return to the United States, Homer settled on the coast of Maine, and there his work acquired a sense of high drama, in seascapes and landscapes that both include and exclude people and animals. Homer had a mastery of design and composition that allowed him to experiment with extra ordinary perspectives. In The Life Line (1884), he shows a dangerous rescue at sea from a PER SPECTIVE that seems as if the artist were also suspended above the roiling water. The point of view is even more vertiginous in Right and Left (1909), in which it seems as if the artist, and therefore the viewer, is flying high above the water with two doomed ducks, one of which has just been shot. The hunter is in a small, open boat located far below. We can barely see him or the spot of red and puff of smoke coming from his gun barrel. Interpretations of this picture's theme have ranged from sporting to metaphysical (especially considering that it was painted about a year and a half before Homer died). His oil paintings are accompanied by a rich collection of watercolors, a medium of which he was the consummate master. It is a fact rarely mentioned but certainly of significance that Homer's mother was an accomplished watercolorist. He had almost no formal education, and his mother's influence must have been important.