American painting and its tradition

by John C. Van Dyke

WINSLOW HOMER

I never had more than a nodding acquaintance with Winslow Homer. Several times at opening nights of the National Academy of Design or elsewhere, there was a word of greeting or comment but no more. He sent me, in 1893 or thereabouts, a signed copy of a reproduction of his “Undertow,” and letters were exchanged about it; but nothing noteworthy was in the letters. My impression about him, if I had one, was perhaps not different from that of his contemporaries. He was always thought a diffident, a taciturn, even at times a brusque, person—one who preferred his own silence to any one else’s loquacity. Chase once remarked that he would thank no one for entertainment because he liked his own art better than any one’s society, but that was mere scorn he was just then flinging out at a Philistine millionaire. The remark would fit Homer much better. For Homer lived it and Chase did not.

Much of Homer’s brusqueness of manner found its way into his art. There is no grace or charm or polish about it. The manner of it repels rather than wins one. The cunning, the adroit, the insinuating are hardly ever apparent, but in their place we have again and again the direct, the abrupt, the vehement. He states things without prelude or apology in a harsh, almost savage, manner, and the chief reason why we listen to him is that he has something to say. He has seen things in nature at first hand and his statement about them brings home fundamental truths to us with startling force. There is no sentiment or feeling in or about the report. The man never falls into a revery as Martin, or a mood as Wyant, or a passion as Inness. He is merely a reporter and is concerned only with the truth. But it is a very compelling truth that he shows us.

He came out of Boston, where in 1836 he was born of New England parents. His father was a hardware merchant and his mother a Maine woman who is said to have had a talent for painting flowers. The inference has been that the son got his first fancy for painting from his mother, though one can hardly imagine anything farther removed from Homer’s liking than the anæmic flower-painting of New England ladies in the 1840’s. On the other hand, his grandfathers had been seafaring men and it is quite possible that he inherited from them that love for the sea that developed in his later life. But then it is difficult to make out that Homer derived anything from any one. He seems to have just grown rather than developed from a stalk or stock.

When he was six his family moved to Cambridge; and thereabouts, in the woods and streams, he hunted, fished, and developed a love for out-of-door life that never left him. There, too, he went to school and put forth his first drawings. There is a drawing extant, done when he was eleven years old, called the “Beetle and the Wedge”[6]—a drawing of boys at play—that Kenyon Cox praises highly, saying that “the essential Winslow Homer, the master of weight and movement, is already here by implication.” It is certainly a remarkable drawing, for it shows not only observation but skill of hand beyond a boy of eleven. Moreover, one is rather surprised at the economy of means employed. It is done easily, with a few strokes, as though the boy-artist had unusual knowledge of form.

[6] Published in Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, Boston, 1911.

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.