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Winslow Homer, Prisoners from the Front, 1866.

Oil on canvas, 61 × 96.5 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, gift of Mrs. Frank B. Porter.

Almost a generation behind Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, also a largely self-taught artist, carried forward Johnson’s gift of portraying the American scene and added a love of the sea to the rustic genre images. He was born on 24 February 1836 in Boston, Massachusetts to Henrietta Benson and Charles Savage Homer. Henrietta grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she learned the art of watercolour. She was an active amateur painter and went on to exhibit with her son at the Boston Art Association in the 1870s.[3] His mother became Winslow’s first teacher.

An even greater influence on his early art training was the legendary Boston romantic painter, Washington Allston (1779–1843). Though he made two trips to Europe, studying various salon painters including the British artist, Benjamin West, Allston became a leading figure in the early nineteenth-century Romantic Movement in America. His emphasis was on landscape, but he concentrated more on mood and emotion than observation of an actual scene. His skills also extended to writing and he produced poetry, novels and treatises on art. Of these, his philosophy ordained that “primary subjects” seen in the painting were supported by underlying “secondary subjects” that enforced the mood and had religious undertones inspired by the revelations of God.

Though Allston died when Homer was just seven years old, the presence of the Great Man was everywhere in the Boston-Cambridge neighbourhoods where he had painted and written. Poetic tributes, exhibitions of his works and publications of his lectures, edited by Richard Henry Dana Jr. – author of Two Years Before the Mast – created a virtual Allston cult. Homer was surrounded by Allston’s acolytes and could not have avoided the artist’s work and philosophies. Homer’s contemporaries and close associates who knew of Allston’s impact claimed they recognised the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ subjects in Homer’s paintings and understood the ‘secret’ to the success of the works. To appreciate Allston’s romantic sensibilities, one of his poems follows.

At the age of nineteen in 1855, Homer was apprenticed to the Boston lithography shop of John Henry Bufford who had studied under New York’s George Endicott and Nathaniel Currier (soon to be partnered with James Merritt Ives) to find practical applications for his art.

He remained at Bufford’s for two years and then embarked as a freelance illustrator finding sketch work at Ballou’s Pictorial and Harpers Weekly. He opened a studio at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City. Located at 51 West Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the Studio Building was a virtual rabbit warren of artist studios that radiated out from a central domed gallery. Artists from all over the country came to the location and took rooms nearby, giving Greenwich Village its new and future reputation as a Bohemian arts centre.

Winslow Homer, Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), c. 1873–1876.

Oil on canvas, 61.5 × 97 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., gift of the W. L. and May T. Mellon Foundation.

At Harpers, where he remained a frequent contributor for years, his sketches made in the field were carved into wood blocks for multiple printing. He also copied images imported from England so they could be used to illustrate stories. And then the largest story he would ever cover burst as artillery shells slammed into Fort Sumter and the American Civil War flashed to life.

Homer was attending classes at the National Academy of Design, studying under Frédéric Rondel, a landscape artist who had just joined the teaching staff. Harpers Weekly armed Homer with sketch pads and sent him off to join the Union Army of the Potomac in 1861. He remained, following the troops and botched campaigns of Major General George B. McClellan. He drew their camps on picket duty, playing cards between battles, and worked alongside photographers whose bulky glass plate cameras could not produce pictures of any troops in action. Their photographic prints had to be turned into steel engravings in order to be printed in newspapers or by Harpers. Most of his sketches differed greatly from the heroic work of Eastman Johnson who produced The Wounded Drummer Boy. Homer seemed more drawn to the homey non-action moments that happened between battles, as with Home Sweet Home showing two Union soldiers boiling water over a fire in an encampment. These intimate scenes became popular with Harpers’ readers, showing how their boys lived when they weren’t fighting or marching. Because of the war’s huge casualty totals, these images of men bonding on the battlefield were comforting.

While many of his drawings copied the stiff compositions of the photographers, he managed to capture some unique, journalistic images such as Sharpshooter on Picket Duty. This drawing shows a Union sniper aiming a rifled musket using a long telescopic gun sight. The new technology allowed marksmen to use these sights to make long range shots and kill enemy officers, harass artillery units and sink the morale of enemy troops. The name ‘sharpshooter’ referred to a specific Sharps breech-loading rifle that, when combined with the telescopic sight, became a deadly and feared weapon. Any snipers captured by opposing troops were usually shot as being godless, cold-blooded murderers. This drawing and another one, Prisoners from the Front, were turned into paintings in Homer’s studio after the war, resulting in his being elected a full academician.

Winslow Homer, The Signal of Distress, 1890.

Oil on canvas, 62 × 98 cm.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

In 1867, he travelled to Paris where Prisoners from the Front was hung in the American section of the Paris World Exposition called the ‘Universal Exhibition’. As with the British Great Exposition of 1851, art was considered a secondary attraction when compared to steam engines, railway trains and mass-produced manufactured products and processes, plus exotic goods and cultures from distant lands. The Americans shipped over a tribe of Indians and their tepees that became a hit for the show. Excluded from the show were the ‘young naturalists’, Cézanne, Degas, Monet and Renoir, who set up their own exhibitions outside the Exposition. The hall devoted to art was small, requiring paintings be hung in rows up to the ceiling. Still, Homer managed to see a broad cross-section of European art from Impressionists to hoary academicians grinding out neo-classical allegories. The London Times wrote:

“In the exhibition palace, one wanted in particular, apart from landscape painting by Rousseau or Français, to see exotic art or images of history in the academic, neo-classicist style. In the event, the walls were mainly covered with works of the panel members, who included: Gérôme, Dupré, Bouguereau, Millet, Daubigny, Huet and Corot, who, other than was the case with Courbet, were each represented with between eight and fourteen paintings. Genre pictures were particularly popular and represented. Although only works were supposed to be exhibited which had been completed after 1 January 1855, the exhibition proved in the final analysis to be a retrospective of recognised artists. Art was, in its undecorated, crowded and uncomfortable presentation, one product among many, only an “agreeable accessoire”, as Charles Blanc, who was himself a panel member, expressed it in 1867 in the Le Temps newspaper[4]

According to the New York Times previewing the show, “The best American works from the best private galleries and studios have been cheerfully placed at their (the U. S. Government) disposition. A collection of the highest character will in consequence be exhibited, instead of the crudities of unknown hands.”[5] While Homer’s painting, Prisoners from the Front bears a striking resemblance to Courbet’s Bonjour Monsieur Courbet with a foreground group against the angled horizon and activity behind them, the Parisians admired it for its closeness in style to the sugary allegorical academician Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Homer stayed on in Paris for a year with his Boston chum, Albert Kelsey, sharing a flat. They were very close friends and had a photo taken that mocked the convention of wedding photography of the time with Kelsey standing behind the seated Homer with his hand on Homer’s shoulder. On the back of the photo, Kelsey wrote, Damion and Pythias, after the Greek lovers. This relationship and a subsequent sketch of Kelsey sitting naked on the back of a giant turtle combined with Homer’s male-dominated lifestyle suggests either an asexual or homosexual bent to his social life. Many of his contemporaries offered that he was “painfully shy” around women, which was not unusual considering his strong Congregationalist church upbringing, with his dominant mother providing his art training.

On the other hand, Homer was considered a man’s man by his male friends, hanging out, drinking and smoking in cafes until the wee hours, even professing to enjoy love affairs. He demonstrated his love of nature and the men who sailed the sea, hunted and farmed the land, his bonding with the soldiers he sketched during the war. And yet as he matured, he sought his own space and little or nothing to do with women except as candid subjects for his sketches and paintings. When he did show women they were strong, independent and happy with their own company as in Promenade on the Beach featuring two women arm and arm at sunset. He also demonstrated how harm can come to women in works such as To the Rescue; a brooding barren, colourless landscape that appears to show two women being pursued by a man with a rope noose. All the Gay and Golden Weather is an engraving produced in 1869 that shows distance and eroded communications between couples. Apparently Homer had little faith in the institution of marriage.

Winslow Homer, Rocky Coast and Gulls, 1869.

Oil on canvas, 41.3 × 71.4 cm.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, bequest of Grenville H. Norcross.

Winslow Homer, Summer Storm, 1904.

Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 76.9 cm.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Winslow Homer, Watching the Brakers, 1891.

Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 101.6 cm.

Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Winslow Homer, Moonlight, 1874.

Watercolour and gouache on paper, 35.6 × 50.8 cm.

The Arkell Museum, Canajoharie, New York.

However, during the 1870s some of the homosexual suspicions were dispelled by an apparent romance that brewed up between Homer and a young amateur artist, Helena de Kay. The relationship began shortly after he returned from his two-year sojourn in Paris. She was a student at the Women’s Art School at the Cooper Union in New York. He likely made her acquaintance through her brother Charles, who occupied Homer’s studio during the artist’s Paris trip. When they met is not clear, but he painted The Bridle Path in 1868 and the resemblance between the rider and Helena is striking and was recognised by several friends.

Seven letters written by Homer to Helena exist and they indicate more than a passing interest or platonic friendship: “Miss Helena, if you would like to see a large drawing on wood, and will come to my studio on Monday or Tuesday, I shall have a chance to see you. Why can’t you make some designs and let me send them to Harpers for you, they will gladly take anything fresh. And I will see that you draw them on the block all right.”

Sadly, the “Come up and see my block of wood” ploy failed to work and Miss Helena demurred. Winslow’s letters then took on a really needy tone, but all to no avail: “Dear Miss Helena, You know you were to let me know when it would be agreeable for me to call at your studio. Having no word from you I suppose you have made other arrangements.” Still later, his note became an entreaty, “My work this winter will be good or very bad. The good work will depend on your coming to see me once a month – at least – Is this asking too much? Truly yours, Winslow Homer.”[6]

But the lady wanted nothing to do with him, so the door clanged shut on future amorous pursuits and he retreated to the disreputable collection of the finest illustrators in New York, the Tile Club, and wallowed in manly camaraderie. The club met frequently to debate art, swap ideas and plan outings to paint. Its membership included such notables as William Merritt Chase, Augustus Saint Gaudens and Arthur Quartley. Homer endured the nickname ‘The Obtuse Bard’.

With a possible eye on the success of Eastman Johnson, during the 1870s Winslow Homer plunged into a series of genre paintings, choosing, like Johnson, to observe the ordinary lives of common people. He granted elegance to the most basic of pursuits. Considering the level of his skills, this choice of less than uplifting subjects confounded both his champions and critics. In 1872, his painting Snap the Whip was displayed in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It shows a line of shabbily dressed boys playing a game, running and tumbling at full speed in an open field. Behind them are an equally shabby barn and a diagonal horizon of two intersecting hills that complements the diminishing line of boys as they run across the width of the painting. Author and social critic Henry James wrote of Homer: “We frankly confess that we detest his subjects… he has chosen the least pictorial range of scenery and civilisation; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial… and, to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded.”

It was also in the 1870s that Homer took up watercolours seriously and for the rest of his days rarely went into the field without his water-based paints and brushes. He explored the games and pensive moments of children and young women, perfecting his watercolour technique for what would later become his signature works in the medium.

Today, through the use of x-rays, the fluorescence spectrometer, infrared micro spectrophotometer and the Raman laser microscope, a team at the Chicago Art Institute has revealed the secrets of Homer’s seemingly casual approach to watercolour. The medium does not usually allow many changes once committed to the paper, but Homer planned his paintings very carefully, drawing every feature in pencil before adding colour. Even after the colour was on the page, he used sandpaper to create hazy skies and fog effects. A sharp knife blade scraped away pigment to reduce intensity and a wet brush applied to already dried pigment created foam on waves and surf at the shore.

Winslow Homer, Two Figures by the Sea, 1882.

Oil on canvas, 50.2 × 88.9 cm.

Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado.

Watercolour is subject to fading over the years and some of his paintings have lost degrees of colour where the originals held tints of sunset orange that added to the overall atmosphere and fading blues have been replaced by bald skies. Some of this fading is due to the use of ‘fugitive’ pigments. Many artists have been guilty of seeing the immediate effect of a colour without a thought about its longevity. Homer employed some colours that, over time, have shifted drastically from the original, or have disappeared altogether. Among these are a colour discovered in antiquity by the ancient Romans and Aztecs called ‘Carmine Red’. It is made of the dried crushed husks of the cochineal bug that lives in colonies on the pads of prickly pear cacti and is cultivated in Mexico and India. It must be mixed with tin oxide to become permanent in fibres. Another was ‘Indian Yellow’, actually created from magnesium euxanthate – the magnesium salt of euxanthic acid, which is the chemical name for the urine of cows that have been fed mangoes.[7]

He did not baulk at making changes in compositions to enhance the story. In the painting After the Hurricane, which shows a man stretched out on the beach amid the wreckage of his small boat, Homer’s original concept had the man’s outstretched arm in the air. X-rays show he overdrew that idea, laying the arm on the sand and leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether the man was dead or not.[8]

Winslow Homer, Rocky Coast, 1883–1900.

Oil on canvas, 35.6 × 86.9 cm.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.

Winslow Homer was a meticulous planner when executing his paintings, but watercolours held another appeal to his creativity. He could work more quickly and increase his production, thereby adding to his income. He also keenly observed the work of other artists, especially after his trip to Paris and exposure to the upstart French Impressionists. His palette lightened considerably and he became one of America’s first ‘modernist’ painters.

Another curious fact has arisen lately concerning this 1870s-80s period of his genre painting. The watercolour Reading, done in 1874 of a fair-haired girl in a dress stretched out the full length of the picture reading a book is in fact a boy hired by Homer to play the part of a girl. This discovery led to similar instances where Winslow Homer substituted boy models for girls. Of course this returns to the matter of his sexual orientation, or did he just feel more comfortable negotiating rates with a boy than a girl?

Did his thwarted relationship with Helena de Kay drive a nail into his further dealings with women – except as observed for a sketch – as subjects? Is that the reason many of his later portraits of young women show pensive, unsure, sad faces? Most women are painted alone or with another woman – but almost never with a man. Does this alienation from women – according to Allston’s teachings – represent a ‘secondary’ subject showing through the ‘primary’ image?

Homer decided to leave for the British Isles in 1881. He visited the British Museum and studied the Elgin Marbles stolen from the Greek Parthenon. He pondered the romanticism of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones and from these studies changed his style to more painterly, dramatic images. He had accumulated all the tools he needed over the years and now shut off his previous society and locked himself into his work. He settled in the coastal fishing village of Cullercoats in Northumberland on the North Sea where the River Tyne empties its currents.

On these shores he documented the fishermen’s daily struggles with the sea and devoured the bleak vistas and salt-scoured rocky coves, the deep rolling combers of the pitiless North Sea. His study of Japanese prints in the 1860s now offered up unusual compositions that placed man at the mercy of the elements. He sought out the families of the fishermen and their hard life, waiting on the beach as their men searched for the great living shoals of fish.

What he found at the edge of the North Sea he brought home with him in 1882 when he moved to a house in Prout’s Neck, Maine, a tide-blasted promontory that thrusts out into the Atlantic. There, he continued to explore with his watercolours, sketchbooks and oils.

Homer’s admiration for the men who went to sea is obvious in his watercolours of their harrowing occupation and the skills needed to survive out on the Grand Banks.

When winter arrived, Homer departed to Florida, Cuba and the Bahamas to paint the native fishermen in their small boats. During these trips, he often was accompanied by his father. Besides the sea, the outdoors attracted his attention. He loved roughing it in the woods and found pleasure in the company of trappers and other woodsmen who spent their lives in direct contact with nature.

Often, he made summer trips up to Essex County, New York and what appeared to be a boarding house in a clearing deep in the woods. This was the North Woods Club of which he became a member in the 1880s. Many members built cottages on the property and the hearty life coupled with rough and sturdy men appealed to Homer. He spent much time tramping about the Adirondacks, fishing, hunting, and relaxing in what became the club house. He painted the men, the forest and the women who ran most of the local boarding houses and camps. He also travelled up into Canada for similar subject matter.

The wilderness seemed to have a calming effect on Homer. His cronies in New York would not have recognised their hail-fellow-well-met carouser with a short fuse. Among the woodsmen and Adirondack residents he was quiet, shy, and capable in woodcraft. He painted images of them and listened to their stories.

He shared their adventures and eventually moved among them as an equal rather than a tourist. The bitter recluse, often reported by people who visited his Prout’s Neck home and studio unannounced or seeking interview, vanished in the great forest.[9]

Finally, at the age of seventy-four he visited the North Woods Club in June 1910. Knowing he was mortally ill, he wanted to experience the serenity and power of the unspoiled wilderness one last time. He was attended by his friend and live-in servant, an African-American named Lewis Wright who had lived with Homer since 1895. They stayed for ten days and then returned to his old rambling house at Prout’s Neck in Scarborough, Maine. His visits to the Adirondack woods had resulted in some well-designed magazine illustrations, fourteen oil paintings and roughly one hundred watercolours. He worked with his watercolours right up to the end because he wanted no unfinished work left behind to be ‘completed’ by some hack with his, Homer’s, name on it. On 29 September, 1910, he died with one painting still on his easel. Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River remains unfinished. He was laid to rest at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had achieved fame and success in his lifetime by his own efforts. He was largely self-taught and spoke a language with his oils and watercolours that still resonates with modern viewers. He was a complex and very private man who drained life to the bottom of the cup – and up-ended the cup when he was finished.

Winslow Homer, Coast in Winter, 1892.

Oil on canvas, 72.4 × 122.6 cm.

Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.