Part 6

The father was evidently pleased with the son’s after-efforts, for at nineteen the youth was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer by the name of Bufford. He started at work without any lessons in drawing and was soon making designs for title-pages of sheet-music and working somewhat upon figures. A wood-engraver named Damereau gave him some hints about drawing on the block, and in the two years that he remained with Bufford he must have picked up much information about drawing for illustration, for at twenty-one he had set up a shop of his own and was making illustrations for _Ballou’s Pictorial_, _Harper’s Weekly_, and other periodicals.

The experience as an illustrator no doubt taught him exact observation, precision in outline drawing, conciseness in statement, and the value of the essential feature. So impressive was this early education that it remained with him and influenced him to the end. He was always an observer and an illustrator. One of his canvases left unfinished at his death, “Shooting the Rapids,” now in the Metropolitan Museum, is primarily an illustration of Adirondack life. It is something more, to be sure, but the point to be noted just here is that the early inclination was never wholly changed. He never became subjective, never intentionally put himself into any of his works. He merely reported what he saw from the point of view of an illustrator.

He came to New York to live in 1859 and attended the night classes at the Academy of Design. There he no doubt improved his drawing. It is said that he also received instruction from Rondel, a Frenchman, and in the Paris Exposition of 1890 he was catalogued as a “pupil of Rondel”; but there must have been some jest behind it, for Homer received only four lessons from Rondel. He was not the man to take lessons from any one. From the beginning he was too self-reliant, too self-centred, to be led very far afield by another’s method or opinion.

In 1860, while still a very young man, he exhibited at the Academy of Design his picture called “Skating in Central Park.” The next year he went to Washington to prepare drawings for Lincoln’s inauguration; and the year following he was the special war-artist of _Harper’s Weekly_ with McClellan in the Peninsular Campaign. His first war-picture done in oils is said to be a “Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty.” It was soon followed by “Rations,” “Home, Sweet Home,” and “The Lost Goose”--two of them shown at the Academy of Design in 1863. The next year he sent “The Briarwood Pipe” and “In Front of the Guard House.” In 1865 he was made an academician for his picture called “The Bright Side,” and shortly afterward his very popular painting “Prisoners from the Front” was shown.

There is nothing remarkable about any of these works. “The Bright Side,” which won Homer the title of N.A., shows some negro soldiers sprawling on the sunny side of an army tent. Like “Rations” and “Prisoners from the Front,” it is just a passable illustration that if made to-day would run small risk of applause. We wonder over the achievement of Homer’s later years, but one is not sure that the lack of achievement in his earlier years is not the more surprising. How could he do such commonplace little pictures! Occasionally something like “Snap the Whip,” which has large drawing comes in to break the monotony; but the dull trend is soon resumed. His audiences and editors must have been decidedly uncritical or else extremely good-natured.

And at this time Homer had practically finished with his apprenticeship to art. He was thirty years old and had already developed aloofness, not to say taciturnity. He kept much by himself, would not look at other people’s pictures or discuss them, would not take advice from any one. This was not because his head had been turned by his popularity; but possibly because he thought he could work out better results alone than with the aid of others. In spite of a little noisy success, he must have known that his paintings up to this time were of small importance. They were hard in drawing, brick-like in color, cramped in handling. Their illustrative quality and the fact that Homer did them are the only interesting things about them to-day.

In 1867 he went to France and spent ten months in Paris, but what he did there can only be guessed at. He evidently attended no schools, haunted no galleries, made no friends among painters. He did some drawings of people copying in the Louvre and dancing in the Students Quarter--that is about all. The inclination of the illustrator was with him rather than the prying instincts of an art student. What cared he about Titian’s nobles or Watteau’s gallants or Chardin’s cooks! They were not themes for him to conjure with. What to him was the _Ecole des Beaux Arts_ or the _atelier_ of Couture! He was well past the student age. He might have thought highly of the works of Millet or Courbet had he studied them, but there is no hint in his work that he had even seen them, though John La Farge said that Homer was largely made by studying the lithographs of the men of 1830.

He came back to America and continued painting American subjects in his own hard, dry, and hot manner. He did some shore themes at Gloucester showing a first interest in the sea, some pictures of girls picking berries or grouped in a country store, some sketches of boys swimming, and men in the hay-fields--all of them showing an interest in country life. But none of them was in any way remarkable. His “Sand Swallow Colony,” with boys robbing the nests under the bank’s edge, is the best type of his illustrations done at this time. It appeared in _Harper’s Weekly_, served its purpose, and went its way without making any perceptible impression upon American art.

In 1874 Homer made a first trip to the Adirondacks, as though searching new magazine material. He found it in the Adirondack guides and in hunting-scenes. In 1876 he went to Virginia, once more looking for painter’s “copy,” and finding it in the American negro. Such pictures as “The Carnival” and a “Visit from the Old Mistress” were the result. It was a _genre_ interesting only in theme, for Homer’s workmanship was still without any great merit or impressiveness. He flung back to the American farmer for a subject, and then once more went to Gloucester to do schooners and ships. In 1873, while staying on Ten Point Island, in Gloucester Harbor, he had drawn some water-colors notable for their high light and their absence of shadow. They seemed to have some purely pictorial quality about them, but the illustrative motive was still behind them. He did not give up work for _Harper’s Weekly_ until 1875, and it was 1880 before he finally abandoned all work for reproduction.

Up to this time Homer had not painted a single epoch-making picture. As Kenyon Cox quite truly says, had he died at forty he would have been unknown to fame. One might draw out the number of years and make them fifty without extravagance of statement. Indeed, it was not until he was sixty that he began to paint his pictures of barren coast and sea upon which his enduring fame must rest, though before that he had given indication in many pictures of fisherfolk, whither he was trending. The blood of his sailor ancestors was coming to the fore at last, and the sea was to be his main theme thereafter. If we believe in genius that is born rather than made, then that, too, began to crop out in his later life.

He went to Tynemouth, England, in 1881, and stayed there for two years in close contact with the fisher people of the coast. This produced a decided change in his art. The large, robust type of English fisher lass, the strongly built sailor in oilskins, appealed to him and remained with him. They were rugged, forceful people that well met his hard drawing and severe brush. There, too, he began picturing the gray sky and mist and sea of England. The heavy atmosphere that hangs like a pall upon the North Sea in stormy weather caught his fancy, and the gray-blue, gray-green waters gave him a new idea of color. The old airless, brick-colored picture of his early days was never taken up again. He dropped readily into cool grays, which in themselves were perhaps no nearer a fine color-harmony than his earlier hot colors, but at the least they were neutral and they were emphatically true of the sea in its stormy phases.

Even Homer’s rigid method of painting began to break a little at Tynemouth. He was working then in water-colors, and perhaps the lighter medium lent itself more readily to a freer handling. His brush loosened, his drawing seemed less angular, less emphasized in outline, and his composition became more a matter of selection and adjustment than of mere accidental appearance.

Mr. Cox, whose excellent monograph on Homer I am glad to quote,[7] thinks that Homer quite found himself at Tynemouth, and points out in the “Voice from the Cliff” his “rhythm of line” whereby he holds the three figures together; but I am not sure that Homer did not get a suggestion of that rhythm of line up in London town on his perhaps occasional visits there. A hint of the types of the fisher girls, the repeated lines of the arms and dresses, with the strength gotten from the repetition, I seem to remember in Leighton’s picture called the “Summer Moon.” Albert Moore, too, was turning out rhythmical repetitions at that time and using models that remind us somewhat of those used by Homer, though, of course, slighter and more fanciful. The fisher girls in the “Voice from the Cliff” and the “Three Girls” are a little too pretty to be wholly original with Homer, and yet it must be acknowledged that such water-colors as “Mending the Nets” and “Watching the Tempest” give warning of the coming man. The two women seated on a bench in the “Mending the Nets” are young-faced, large-boned, big-bodied types that have a sculpturesque quality about them; and the “Watching the Tempest” throws out a suggestion of the Homeric sea that is to be.

[7] _Winslow Homer: An Appreciation_, by Kenyon Cox, New York, 1914.

It was in 1884 that Homer finally went to Prout’s Neck, near Scarborough, where he built a cottage on the shore and lived for the rest of his life, quite alone, practically shut out from art and artists, a recluse and a hermit yet within gunshot of a crowd. He lived there much as Thoreau at Walden Pond, cooking his own meals, doing his own gardening, raising his own tobacco, and rolling his own cigars. The city had never been attractive to him, and from first to last he preferred picturing the open spaces rather than streets and houses.

It was from the isolation of Prout’s Neck that he began sending forth the pictures that made him famous. One of the earliest was the “Life Line” of 1884. It is a most dramatic illustration of a rescue at sea--a girl being brought ashore by a life-saving-station man. The two are swung in a buoy from the taut life-line and are being windlassed through the great waves. The girl is unconscious, and, lying helpless, catches the eye and the sympathy at once. That our interest in her might be all-absorbing, the painter has hidden the man’s face by a woollen muffler blown out by the wind.

Now the “Life Line” is very forceful story-telling with the brush, but let it not be overlooked that it is story-telling--illustration. The illustrator, with an eye for the critical moment and the appealing interest, is just as apparent here as in “Snap the Whip” or “Prisoners from the Front.” Winslow Homer, the pictorial reporter, is still present. All along he has been answering the question: “What does it mean?” He is still interested in that, but he is now beginning to think about the artist’s question: “How does it look?” He is just a little concerned about his form and his color, his composition, and his general pictorial effect. They are not what they should be. The wet, clinging garments of the girl reveal a large and very hard figure. It is rigid in its outlines and stony in its texture, as though reinforced for purposes of mechanical reproduction. The man is little more than so much tackle and line, so ropelike is his treatment, and the enormous hollow of the sea is merely a perilous background. As for color, the picture is gray and would lose none of its fetching quality if done in black-and-white. There is no love for color as color nor for painting as painting here. The handling was evidently as little pleasure to the painter as it is to us. It is as flat, as monotonous, and as negative as the plaster on a kitchen wall. There is no suspicion of subtlety, facility, or suavity in it. But when all that is said, there is a large something left behind unaccounted for--a grip and knowledge and point of view--that we respect and admire.

A second dramatic and harrowing picture finished at Prout’s Neck was “Undertow.” It is a rescue of two girl bathers by life-savers, something that the painter had seen in the surf at Atlantic City. It appealed to him. Why? Because it was beautiful in itself? Hardly that; but because it had great illustrative possibilities. There once more was the critical moment and the appealing interest. He could not resist such “copy” as that. But now in putting the picture together he is something more than a reporter of the fact. He embellishes the fact to make it not only more effective but more attractive. He places the figures on the canvas in a diagonal line that echoes the diagonal of the incoming wave at the back. The lines give a swing and surge forward not only to the sea but to the figures. The four figures are locked in a long chain--almost a death-grip--with clutching hands and arms and much use of angle lines. The angle lines repeat one another, interlock, and run on until the whole group is of a piece--moves as a piece. All this, of course, helps on the literary but it also indicates a growing sense of the pictorial. The four figures begin to have the monumental quality of a Greek pedimental group. The very sharpness of their drawing and the hardness of their texture seem to help out the plastic feeling. Homer seems rising to the difference between the merely illustrative and the picturesque in design; but his color sense stirs only sluggishly. The “Undertow” is pitched in neutral grays and greens, and one cannot rave over it.

At this time the painter was spending his winter months not on the Maine coast but down in the Bahamas or Cuba or Bermuda. While in those places he did a great many water-colors--glimpses of palm and sand and sea with white houses glaring in the sun. They were done with much freedom, with a sense of blinding light, and some realization of color. The quality of mere “copy” drops out of them, or perhaps was never in them. They seem scraps of pictures, delightful glimpses of such pictorial features as sun and shade and bright hues. It looks from them as though Homer would finally emerge as a great painter and forget his early point of view. And at times he does. But he has lapses, and the bias of his early days returns to him.

From his Southern trips came the material for “The Gulf Stream” done about 1886. Once more the painter has grasped the psychological moment. A shipwrecked, starving negro is lying on the deck of a dismasted schooner drifting in the Gulf Stream. In the shadowed water of the foreground sharks are playing, beyond the boat are whitecaps and running seas, in the distance is the suggestion of a waterspout under a blue-gray sky. There is quite a display of color. It is in the sea and sky, but its breadth is somewhat disturbed by being flecked with white in patches. The picture is spotty in the foam and the clouds, and does not sum up as a complete harmony. It seems as though color were not an integral part of it but something brought in as an afterthought--color added to design rather than design in color.

This is not the case, however, with the very beautiful “Herring Net,” done at about the same time. It is another open-sea piece with fishermen drawing into a boat a net full of wriggling fish caught in the meshes. Herring, as they come out of the water, are brilliant in iridescent hues, and no doubt that in itself appealed to Homer and was the reason for the picture’s existence. The color at once became the illustrative motive--became the picture. There is no feeling now of color as an afterthought or as playing second part to the men or the sea. The eye goes to the glittering herring at once. You comprehend at a glance that this is a color scheme _per se_, and that the gray men and the gray sea are only a ground upon which the iridescent hues appear. Whether Homer realized how beautiful the color was, whether he had any emotional feeling about it, or saw any fine pictorial poetry in it, who shall say? In life he was disposed to deny such things. He said to John W. Beatty: “When I have selected a thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears.” Was that his procedure with the “Herring Net”? Was it merely a color report of what he had seen? If so, he never saw anything so beautiful again. It is his high-water mark as a colorist.

Homer was now producing his best-known pictures of fishermen, sailors, and sea, such as the “Fog Warning” and “Eight Bells.” A literary half-illustrative quality marks them, but perhaps we should not feel this did we not know the painter had served time at that side of art. They can stand as great pictures all by themselves, simply because they are powerful characterizations of the sea. They have a driving truth about them that sweeps away any demurrer on account of their method. And in them all there is indication and suggestion of an expanding pictorial sense. It came late, for Homer was fifty. It was never to become a complete expansion, it was always more of a suggestion than a realization; but it was a welcome addition and showed the painter’s active and receptive mind.

While in Cuba Homer got the material for his “Searchlight, Santiago Harbor,” which he put in picture form about 1899. There is a great dark gun in the foreground--the dramatic catch-point, again--with a suggestion of a mason-work fort around it. A search-light flares up the sky; the sky itself is a gray-blue night effect. The arrangement is large, big in simplicity of masses. The color is the usual gray-blue, but there is a fine note about it, with a light and an air that would count for little in reproduction but are very effective in the picture itself. The canvas comes precious near being a great affair of form, light, and air. It is as sharp in drawing and as flat and dull in its surface painting as his other works. The naïve simplicity of the brush-work is astonishing. Homer knows no tricks of handling, and will resort to no glazes, scumbles, or stipples. He makes his statement so unadorned that it seems almost crude or immature. And yet with these shortcomings we still have an unusual quality of light, a rare night sky, and a suggestion, at least, of fine color.

If the artistic sense seemed to be growing with Homer in his late years, the early illustrative sense was not exactly dead or dying. From first to last he knew how to characterize things--to catch and give the salient features with force. Nothing he ever did shows this better than his “Fox and Crows,” now in the Pennsylvania Academy. A red fox is trailing through soft, deep snow and some crows are hawking and dipping at him, as is their wont. Off in the distance is a glimpse of the sea under a gray sky. It is composition, characterization, and illustration all in one. Nothing could be more original or more truthful. From this picture alone one might think Homer an experienced animal painter, but it happens to be his one and only animal picture. It is practically an arrangement in black-and-white, well massed and effectively placed on the canvas. The blacks of the near crows are repeated in the far crows and in the ears and forepaws of the fox; the white of the snow is repeated in the sea and sky; the gray half-tones are echoed in the fox and rocks and clouds. It is not only an excellent design fully wrought but the effect of the skill is apparent in the convincing truth of fox and snow and winter shore.

Finally came a series of pictures in which bird and beast and man are left out and only the great sea and its fearsome fret on the shore remain. “Cannon Rock,” done about 1895, shows a section of rocky coast with blue-green waves pushing in and curling in white crests. In the “Northeaster” a green-and-white wave is breaking over a rock and the spray and foam are flung high in air. The “Maine Coast” is a wild day along shore with rain and mist and spindrift and flying scud in the air; there is blue-gray sky and sea, and far out the huge waves are lifting and rolling shoreward with irresistible force. On the rocky coast the foaming crests are falling amid split and shattered rock strata. “High Cliff” and the “Great Gale” are variations of the same theme.

Of course these pictures are illustrative in a way of the Maine coast, but one does not think of them as such but rather as descriptive or creative. They are reports of the power of the sea, wonderful view-points of a great element. In that sense they are epic, tremendous characterizations, all-powerful statements that startle and command. You cannot get away from them. They fascinate, and yet are not attractive in the sense that you would like to have one of them in your drawing-room. They are elemental rather than ornamental. As Kenyon Cox well puts it, you might as well let the sea itself into your house as one of Homer’s sea-pictures. The picture would sweep everything before it, put everything else out of key, make a black spot on the wall, and continually irritate you with its harshness of method. From his youth upward Homer seems to have had a scorn for the decorative. Charm either in his personality or his art seems to have been a gift withheld by the fairy godmother. He had the giant’s strength and with it he had to accept the limitations of that endowment. The gentler side of the sea--the flat summer plains of glorious color and light--he did not care for, and even such features of the stormy sea as the flashing, foaming crests he could not do except in hard, immovable form. The crests in the “Woods Island Light” look like inlays of white marble on lapis lazuli. The bubbling surge full of color and evanescent as champagne was too charming, too lovely for him.

There were returns to the illustrative during his later years in such pictures as “The Wreck,” “Kissing the Moon,” and in Adirondack scenes, but by 1900 he had reached his apogee and thereafter changed little. He was not to break out any new sails. Nor was there need of it. His great ability and originality had been abundantly displayed and universally recognized by both painter and public. Honors, enough and to spare, were his. In 1893, at Chicago, he had been awarded the gold medal, and everything that art societies could do or artists and critics could say had been done and said. Up at Prout’s Neck, where he had shut the door after him and kept it closed for so many years, these echoes of the world’s recognition were received with indifference. Miss Mechlin quotes from a letter of his in 1907:

“Perhaps you think I am still painting and interested in art. That is a mistake. I care nothing for art. I no longer paint. I do not wish to see my name in print again.”