Picture The Life Line by American painter Winslow Homer

Circumstance effectually precluded the possibility of painter Winslow Homer's ever posing his models so as actually to paint from observation such pictures as The Life Line and The Undertow, and he had no sufficient knowledge of the figure to enable him to visualize, so as to paint from mental projections, the actual appearance of such scenes. Homer himself said that when he had selected a subject he painted it exactly as it appeared, and the sense in which this may have been true is indicated very clearly, by the measure in which he failed in some of his later works to picture the figure with any sort of convincing approximation to that realism in which it generally appears in his earlier canvases. Certainly the fact that a picture tells a story in no way prevents its being perhaps a great work of art, and in an exact ratio to the importance of the story a picture tells it may or may not be a masterpiece as an artist succeeds or fails in his presentation of whatever the subject may be. The common criticism of painter Homer is that he is an illustrator, not an artist; it is based upon an incomplete knowledge of his work and practically ignores the best of it those great marines that tell no stories and that have no meanings other than those that are inseparably associated with our thought of the sea, its power and its immensity. As a matter of fact, he was an illustrator and a very able one, and furthermore he was a great artist; he became a great artist whenever he gave up painting stories of the sea to paint the sea itself, as will be evident enough, to any one who contemplates such canvases as the Northeaster, and the Early Morning after a Storm at Sea. It is worth while to remark that, precisely because Homer painted a subject exactly as it appeared, his pictures of the sea are the greatest of our time, for they are above all else masterpieces of realism.

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