On the Threshold – Art & Antiques Magazine


The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on Winslow Homer situates his artwork within its period and reflects on history

By Sarah Bochicchio

For over a century, Winslow Homer has been canonized as one of the great American painters, if not the single greatest among them. His brooding Turner-esque seascapes, his seemingly playful images of beachside promenades, his grassy landscapes and hunting scenes have cornered a specific and enduring visual lexicon of the American nineteenth century. Yet, a key element of Homer’s work has often been sidelined in art historical narratives: Winslow Homer was an artist of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, the aftermath of what was arguably the nation’s first total war, and the resulting struggle to live amidst a fundamentally altered landscape.

The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas, 24 1⁄8 x 38 1⁄8 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967(67.187.131). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Even the most joyful of Homer’s images feel sobering—because they are imbued with life’s daily struggles, and, just as often, the much larger, existential questions about destiny, mortality, and the social and political complexities of the period. His work, much like that of his contemporary Louisa May Alcott, applied a multifaceted prism to this moment in American history, allowing key cultural concepts, quiet ideals and simmering hypocrisies to refract outward.

Currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” offers an opportunity to reflect on the multidimensionality of the artist and to situate him within his period. Co-curated by Stephanie Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture, and Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing, both at The Met, the exhibition takes an explicitly historical and scholarly approach to the artist.

Homer was a keen observer who took his brush from the battlefield to the home front to a burgeoning, tropical tourism industry in the Caribbean, and Herdrich and Yount reconsider Homer’s life and subjects with an eye to new research on the Atlantic World and his studies of post-emancipation Black subjects. Organized thematically, “Crosscurrents” shows Homer’s artistic and personal development from the Civil War onwards, looking at how the different waves of his life, experience and context, swelled into the keenly observed, politically inspired maritime works from his mature period.

The Cotton Pickers, 1876. Oil on canvas, 24 1⁄16 x 38 1⁄8 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Acquisition made possible through Museum Trustees: Robert O. Anderson, R. Stanton Avery, B. Gerald Cantor, Edward W. Carter, Justin Dart, Charles E. Ducommun, Camilla Chandler Frost, Julian Ganz, Jr., Dr. Armand Hammer, Harry Lenart, Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, Mrs. Joan Palevsky, Richard E. Sherwood, Maynard J. Toll, and Hal B. Wallis (M.77.68).Digital Image ©2021 Museum Associates/LACMA. Licensed by ArtResource, NY.

Homer was born in Boston in 1836, the second of three sons. He spent most of his childhood in Cambridge, which was, at the time, a rural area. His artistic interests emerged early on and were supported by his parents—his mother was an amateur watercolorist who bonded with him over their shared craft and his father arranged for him to begin an apprenticeship with a Boston-based lithographer, John H. Bufford, when he turned 19. Homer famously considered this training a “treadmill experience” due to its repetitive nature and vowed to strike out on his own. In 1857, once the apprenticeship had ended, Homer established himself as a freelance illustrator, working for prominent publications like the New York-based Harper’s Weekly. He moved from Boston to New York in 1859, where he took classes at the National Academy of Design.

In 1861, Harper’s sent Homer to Virginia, to the frontlines of the Civil War. As an artist-correspondent, he depicted the quotidian lives of soldiers, and from this period forward, Homer’s oil paintings became deeply concerned with the profound emotional and social effects of the war. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust has written extensively on the pervasive suffering that the Civil War inflicted. “For those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience…was the presence of death,” she explains in This Republic of Suffering. “Death’s threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war’s experiences.”

Sharpshooter, 1863. Oil on canvas, 12 1⁄4 x 16 1⁄2 in.
Portland Museum of Art, Maine, Gift of Barbro and Bernard Osher (1992.41). Photo courtesy of Meyersphoto.com.

Homer’s early paintings are directly inspired by his time on the frontlines. Homer’s first major oil painting, Sharpshooter (1863), reflects the omnipresent morbidity that he would have witnessed two years into the war. The painting shows a Union soldier roosted on a tree branch, aiming at someone outside of the canvas’s purview. It is a sinister image; where light should beam through the tree’s pines, the sharpshooter inserts himself in its midst, elongating his limbs in parallel to the tree’s branches. The same branch that might have been a playground for a young child (one thinks of Jo March putting a saddle on a tree branch to practice horseback-riding in Little Women) becomes an elevation point for the murder of an unsuspecting target.

The painting also grapples with the conflict between man and nature and the technological advancements that rendered warfare even less humane. Three decades later, Homer was still affected by his memories of the battlefield. In a letter to a Civil War veteran in 1896, Homer recalled, “I looked through one of their [sharpshooters’] rifles once when they were in a peach orchard in front of Yorktown in April 1862…I was not a soldier—but a camp follower & artist, the above impression struck me as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army & I always had a horror of that branch of the service.” Homer’s works, throughout his life, deal with the situations and images adjacent-to-death, from shipwrecks and rescue missions to hunting. “Death’s proximity,” as Faust calls it, is one of the few certainties in Homer’s work, which is otherwise probing and curious, more than prescriptive.

Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide), 1870. Oil on canvas, 26 x 38 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. William F. Milton, 1923 (23.77.2). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As the Civil War was ending, Homer focused on oil painting, and his works from this period became more experimental, wrestling with life on the threshold. After the war, Homer made his first trip to Paris; he had now secured his reputation and was showing two paintings at the Exposition Universelle. Like the impressionists, he worked outside in natural light (only one painting in “Crosscurrents” depicts an interior scene), began looking at Japanese prints, and his palette became brighter.

His paintings from the late 1860s and 1870s ambivalently showcase the changing lifestyles during these years. His well-known painting, Veteran in a New Field (1865), features a single figure reaping a golden wheat field. Compositionally, it alludes to The Sower (1850), by Jean-François Millet, but Homer has applied the symbolic wheat field to the specific concerns of 1865. As Faust explains, “In the Civil War, the United States, North and South, reaped what many participants described as a ‘harvest of death.’” One imagines that Homer’s veteran, who has swapped the battlefield for the wheat field, must readjust to civilian life, experiencing simultaneously a sense of loss for the world that had disappeared and optimism for the new one that was arriving.

His monumental painting, The Cotton Pickers (1876), depicts two recently emancipated women in Reconstruction-era Virginia. Wading through a cotton field, the women glance out in separate directions; one reaches down toward the cotton bolls, as if lost in thought, the other looks past the horizon, as if searching for something in the distance. Their gazes feel probing, full of questions about and concern for their futures. The two women seem too engrossed in their own thoughts—or perhaps too worried—to broach the subject with each other.

Around this time, Homer also became increasingly concerned with maritime scenes, spending more and more time by the sea. Scholars have only speculated as to why Homer appeared to self-isolate in this period. He was famously private (he allegedly told a would-be biographer “It would probably kill me to have such a thing [a biography] appear.”) and sought out smaller towns and villages to spend his time. The “Crosscurrents” curators suggest he was attracted to the seaside for its aesthetic promise, as well as its potentially comforting atmosphere.

The Gulf Stream, 1899. Oil on canvas, 28 1⁄8 x 49 1⁄8 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906 (06.1234). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In Gloucester, Massachusetts, Homer painted some of his most well-known works, imbuing seemingly idyllic scenes with dark undertones. In his 1870 work Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide), three women bathers dry off after a swim; one wrings out her bathing costume, while a small dog stares on. To Homer’s contemporaries, the scene was “ungainly,” likely because the women were working class and their narrative was unclear. In response to a query about a similar painting of women promenading, Homer evasively and snarkily replied, “The Girls are ‘somebody in particular’ & I can vouch for their good moral character. They are looking at anything that you wish to have them look at, but it must be something at sea & a very proper & appropriate object for Girls to be interested in.” Yet there is something unsettling about Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide) — perhaps in the disquieting look cast by the seated bather, the dog’s startled reaction or the unwelcoming sky.

Post-Massachusetts, Homer continued to pursue the shoreline. In 1881, he visited Cullercoats, a remote village in England, where he studied the working classes who both made their living by the sea and were threatened by its unpredictability. Homer’s oeuvre moved distinctly toward scenes of storm-tossed waves, the brutality of nature, and the necessary rescue missions, as he honored the women who endured its tumult and awaited the uncertain return of loved ones.

After his English sojourn and until the end of his life, Homer split his time between his home in Prouts Neck, Maine, and traveling around the Caribbean. One of the revelations of “Crosscurrents” is Homer’s practice in watercolor—the brilliant, sun-soaked paintings he created while visiting the Bahamas, Florida, Cuba and Bermuda. Critics historically marginalized the works, seeing them as sketchy or incompatible with the rest of the artist’s oeuvre, but in “Crosscurrents”, the curators position the astonishing, bright tropical scenes as a key to understanding his later period.

In these watercolors, Homer shows landscapes so verdant, so postcard-perfect that it feels as though he finally experienced happiness, after years of watching his neighbors and country acclimate to post-war life. Except Homer dialectically observes both the luxuries available to tourists and the structural racism that ran throughout the Bahamas, then still a British colony. In A Garden in Nassau, Homer depicts an enclosed garden with flora so lush that it can barely be contained within the gated walls. A little boy glances up at the gate to the inaccessible garden. Many of Homer’s tropical paintings observe the exclusion of Black islanders from their own landscapes; an earlier version of A Garden in Nassau even featured two figures attempting to climb over the gate.

Homer’s preoccupation with the oceanic tumult took two distinct forms as he traveled during this period—there was the explicit, baroque monumentality of nature’s force as displayed in the stormy scenes, and then, the quiet beauty with allusions to political structures, as exhibited in his Caribbean watercolors. In the exhibition, the curators frame Homer’s masterpiece, The Gulf Stream (1899), at its center, which bridges the various dialogues from early in his career with his maritime concerns. The Gulf Stream represents the swelling intensity of the artist’s aesthetic, political and social preoccupations.

Homer painted The Gulf Stream in 1898 after the death of his father. It is a dramatic maritime scene, wherein a Black figure is apparently lost at sea, his body tangled up in sugar canes and his tattered sailboat, surrounded by choppy waters and angling sharks. His reclining pose feels at odds with the imminent danger; he seems to have accepted the situation. He seems to wait, rather than search, as he looks out on the horizon. The curators propose the painting as a metaphor for the slavery’s continuing hold on American society and the menace of imperialism, though when asked about the painting’s subject, Homer sneeringly replied, “The subject of this picture is comprised in its title & I will refer these inquisitive schoolma’ms to Lieut. Maury.”

In The Gulf Stream, as in other works from the end of his life, Homer observes undelivered promises, as he reflected on the last few decades. On the brink of a new century, Homer no longer probed the threshold between optimism and uncertainty. Instead, The Gulf Stream’s central question seems to be whether tragedy will be propelled by man or nature, if not both.

Homer died a few years after painting The Gulf Stream. He was still working and producing at his studio in Prouts Neck, observing the alterations in the landscape and, as always, the liminal worlds that played out throughout the day. After many years scrutinizing and documenting struggle, Homer was still fascinated by these themes in his work, but in his life, he found space to pause. He wrote in a letter, “The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.”



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