Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer (1836-1910)

By the end of his life, Winslow Homer was considered America's greatest native painter, an opinion shared by many today. Born in Boston and raised in Cambridge, he was apprenticed to a lithographer in his hometown when he was nineteen. He finished his apprenticeship in 1857, and in 1859 he moved to New York, where he covered the Civil War for “Harper's”. During these years he began to develop his abilities as an oil painter and began exhibiting regularly in 1863.

Homer's experience as an illustrator provided the subjects of his first paintings-scenes of the Civil War and of fashionable life. After the war, he gained fame with “Prisoners from the Front” (1866; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The painting was exhibited at the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris and Homer took the opportunity to travel to France. The trip, however, seems to have made little impression on him. His subjects for the next decade or so were rural, ranging from the mountains to the seaside and representing both tourists and laborers. In 1875 he was able to cease working as an illustrator, because of the success of his oils and his new field, watercolors.

In 1881 and 1882 Homer lived in the small English fishing village of Cullercoats on the North Sea. Upon his return to the United States, he soon abandoned New York for the relative isolation of Prout's Neck, Maine. His work increasingly reflected the lessons he had learned in England about the indifferent or hostile power of nature and the strength of the people who must respond to it. For the rest of his career, he concentrated on simple powerful landscapes and seascapes, ranging from Maine to the Adirondacks to the Caribbean, that contrast human heroism with the forces of nature. It is by these works that his contemporaries judged him one of America's greatest artists.

“Ship's Boat”, 1883

Watercolor on paper, 16 x 29 in. (40.6 x 73.7 cm)

Signed and dated (lower left): “Winslow Homer 1883”

Charles F. Smith Fund (1940.2)

From 1881 to 1882 Homer lived in Cullercoats, a small fishing village in the north of England. There he had explored the lives of the fishermen and women and their sometimes fatal interaction with the sea. He witnessed at least one wreck, and the potential violence of the ocean overshadowed nearly all his work of this period, even his quiet scenes of women waiting on the shore for their men. It is in Cullercoats that Homer first began to deal with the subject that dominated his last great works: humanity and the ocean.

In 1883, not long after his return to New York, Homer left the city for Prout's Neck, a small peninsula south of Portland, Maine, that his family was developing into a summer resort. He would move there permanently in 1884. Before he got to Maine, however, he spent time in New Jersey witnessing life-saving demonstrations. During that first summer in Maine, he began to explore the landscape of Prout's Neck with a series of watercolors. “Ship's Boat” sums up these events: the subject matter derives from Cullercoats and Atlantic City, but the coast, with its scrubby pines and sloping rocks, is one of Homer's first depictions of his new home.

Our knowledge of the setting-that this is Homer's "home"-emphasizes the tragedy. Four men trying to get to shore in their ship's boat are capsized only a short distance from land. They are too far away to be seen as individuals, but the raised hands, which cannot grip anything to save them, seem horrible parodies of farewell. Yet the artist's vantage point is a distanced one: they are not seen from the land, where one would welcome them, but from the side of the ocean, where our eye is suspended ominipotently above the waves.

Many of Homer's watercolors represent ideas he would develop later in oil paintings; in some instances the painting virtually reproduces the watercolor. “Ship's Boat” has no direct successor in oil but is does explore a situation Homer would turn to repeatedly in his paintings, such as “The Life Line” (1884; Philadelphia Museum of Art), which was based directly on the life-saving demonstrations witnessed in 1883, “The Fog Warning” (1885; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), “Gulf Stream” (1899; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), “On a Lee Shore” (1900; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence), and “Summer Squall” (1904; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.). None of these oils, howver, is as violent as this watercolor (again, quite typically the oils tone down the emotions of the watercolors); no one in the oils is drowning. The watercolors are where he experimented; the oils are where he produced final statements, judiciously deleting many distracting and momentary effects. “Ship's Boat” represents the end of the story Homer pursued repeatedly in his greatest paintings, but one he never dared commit to oil.

BR

Bibliography:

Lloyd Goodrich, “Winslow Homer” (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1944); John Wilmerding, “Winslow Homer” (New York: Praeger, 1972); Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., “Winslow Homer” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990); Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, “Winslow Homer”, exhib. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).