Picture Visit of the Mistress by American painter Winslow Homer

In a picture like The Bright Side, 1865, or The Visit of the Mistress by American painter Winslow Homer, 1876, at the National Gallery, Washington, there is no attempt to tell any story. But the happy abandon of the negro teamsters in the former is as infectious as the quiet contentment of the latter is satisfying to the observer. The individualities of the people pictured by American painter Winslow Homer are preserved in such a way as to convey to one an exact sense of their feelings, and it is because of this that the pictures appeal to us. They are notable examples of his ability to reproduce the sentiment as well as the appearance of a scene, and in their realism they compare with the best of his work in which the figure appears at all.

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.

Picture Song of the Lark by American painter Winslow Homer

None of Winslow Homer’s canvases of early period are numbered among those which justify the preeminence of his position as an American painter is due more, perhaps, to the insistent dramatic quality of his later product than to any degree of artistic superiority in it sufficient to account for the prevailing neglect of the very notable compositions of his youth. If he eventually concluded that the native farmhand was an inartistic subject, it was not before he had painted one or two pictures of him that are fine enough in themselves to hold their own, in every sense save that of mere size, with some of the more pretentious of his later works. The figures in his early paintings not merely more convincing in construction but more satisfying in their individuality. They may not be so heroic in form, but neither are they so wooden in structure as those that follow in his great marines.

His early pictures also are eminently realistic and exact in their interpretation of everyday life, and very often as void of any literary meaning as the finest of his later works. They have always a human interest, however, associated with our knowledge of life, which suffices to arrest and hold the attention, and oftener than not they are really inviting in their coloring. Song of the Lark, 1876 (an idea which he used again, many years afterward, in the large canvas at Milwaukee), is excellent example of the finer sort of realism one finds in his farmyard pictures. Here all is simplicity and the figure has all the accustomed value of its actual importance in the scene no more, no less. They have generally more reality in their obvious relation to their surroundings than the figures he uses to illustrate his stories of the sea. Probably the very fact that at first he aimed at nothing more than a truthful rendering of what he found interesting in life, instead of endeavoring to produce instantaneous records of its dramatic moments, is sufficient to account for the sense of reality in these earlier and miss in his later productions.

Picture The Prout’s Neck by American painter Winslow Homer

Of landscape Winslow Homer painted very little. The two examples, one comparatively early and the other quite late, are therefore of all the more interest, simply as illustrating a very uncommon and little known departure from his customary and familiar habit. The earlier picture is a result of his trip to France, and though appreciably tighter in treatment than the Prout’s Neck sketch, it has all of the out-of-door feeling that so sensibly constitutes the persuasive charm of the later canvas. It is also entirely as enjoyable in color, and from it one gets definitely the feeling of locality which is a quality that differentiates honest from inferior landscape painting. The Prout’s Neck is a study so marked with the conscious realization of actual appearances and an adequate rendering of their artistic interest as to persuade one that Homer might well have evolved from such an auspicious experiment a landscape as vital as the most impressive of his marines. It is instinct with the evidence of an intimate understanding of significant form, finislied with a rare economy of effort in the matter of mere painting, and not only satisfies the most exacting expectations of the realist, but measurably fulfils the higher aim of pictorial art in its suggestive indication of abstract beauty.

Picture Musical Amateurs by American painter Winslow Homer

The picture Musical Amateurs, formerly in the collection of Mr. John H. Converse and now owned by Mr. De Vine, possesses somewhat of the Whistlerian quality that Kenyon Cox has remarked in another early Homer, the New England Country School. Indeed, a sketch for the figure of the Cellist reminded one very forcibly of another sketch of a Cellist, from the brush of Whistler himself, formerly in the late William M. Chase’s collection and now in that of Mr. Frank Vanderlip. The picture Musical Amateurs is dated 1867 and is not uninteresting in color. The sincerity of the study of the two musicians is sufficient to convey a definite idea of their personalities to anyone interested enough in such a subject to examine the canvas with the attention it deserves. And such an examination will discover in it also a fine tonality and a charming breadth of handling that was not at all common to the genre painting of the day in this country. In these pictures of Homer’s the pose, whatever it is, is natural, not theatrical in the sense that many of the figures in later canvases are obviously arranged in difficult tableaux to illustrate unusual stories. In doing just that sort of thing he oftener than not sacrificed too much of the realism, the truth, of life, to be very convincing, and to some of us, at least, a few of his greatest canvases can therefore never be anything other than noble failures.

Picture The Haymaking by American painter Winslow Homer

Thomas Bailey Aldrich in 1866 wrote of Winslow Homer’s early studio in the old University building in New York, that “it is remarkable for nothing but its contracted dimensions; it seems altogether too small for a man to have a large idea in.” As a matter of fact, most of Homer’s ideas then, as later, came to him elsewhere; in soldier camps, at Houghton farm, in the North Woods, Bermuda or Maine. Eventually, however, the cramped life of the city, encompassed by walled streets and harassed by the unnatural noises of endless traffic, drove him to the distant coast of Maine, where he found a congenial home and his greatest inspiration in a supreme interpretation of the grandeur of the sea. His reputation as a marine painter has been sufficiently established by the able exposition of other critics and needs no further emphasis, but there is something more of merit to be found in his early oil paintings than others have recognized. Admitting their technical deficiencies, which indeed he really never overcame, the charm of his farmyard and school-house pictures and the realism of his Civil War subjects are sufficiently compelling to permit one the belief that they have been somewhat neglected or certainly overlooked for the more pretentious marines which he produced in later years. It would be surprising indeed if an artist who was capable as a boy of eleven of producing such a masterly little drawing as that of the boys playing Beetle and Wedge should not achieve something of distinction in his early oil paintings of ten or fifteen years later. The Haymaking, 1864, is excellent example of the finer sort of realism one finds in his farmyard pictures.