There is nothing remarkable about any of these works. “The Bright Side,” which won Homer the title of N.A., shows some negro soldiers sprawling on the sunny side of an army tent. Like “Rations” and “Prisoners from the Front,” it is just a passable illustration that if made to-day would run small risk of applause. We wonder over the achievement of Homer’s later years, but one is not sure that the lack of achievement in his earlier years is not the more surprising. How could he do such commonplace little pictures! Occasionally something like “Snap the Whip,” which has large drawing comes in to break the monotony; but the dull trend is soon resumed. His audiences and editors must have been decidedly uncritical or else extremely good-natured.
And at this time Homer had practically finished with his apprenticeship to art. He was thirty years old and had already developed aloofness, not to say taciturnity. He kept much by himself, would not look at other people’s pictures or discuss them, would not take advice from any one. This was not because his head had been turned by his popularity; but possibly because he thought he could work out better results alone than with the aid of others. In spite of a little noisy success, he must have known that his paintings up to this time were of small importance. They were hard in drawing, brick-like in color, cramped in handling. Their illustrative quality and the fact that Homer did them are the only interesting things about them to-day.
In 1867 he went to France and spent ten months in Paris, but what he did there can only be guessed at. He evidently attended no schools, haunted no galleries, made no friends among painters. He did some drawings of people copying in the Louvre and dancing in the Students Quarter—that is about all. The inclination of the illustrator was with him rather than the prying instincts of an art student. What cared he about Titian’s nobles or Watteau’s gallants or Chardin’s cooks! They were not themes for him to conjure with. What to him was the Ecole des Beaux Arts or the atelier of Couture! He was well past the student age. He might have thought highly of the works of Millet or Courbet had he studied them, but there is no hint in his work that he had even seen them, though John La Farge said that Homer was largely made by studying the lithographs of the men of 1830.
He came back to America and continued painting American subjects in his own hard, dry, and hot manner. He did some shore themes at Gloucester showing a first interest in the sea, some pictures of girls picking berries or grouped in a country store, some sketches of boys swimming, and men in the hay-fields—all of them showing an interest in country life. But none of them was in any way remarkable. His “Sand Swallow Colony,” with boys robbing the nests under the bank’s edge, is the best type of his illustrations done at this time. It appeared in Harper’s Weekly, served its purpose, and went its way without making any perceptible impression upon American art.
In 1874 Homer made a first trip to the Adirondacks, as though searching new magazine material. He found it in the Adirondack guides and in hunting-scenes. In 1876 he went to Virginia, once more looking for painter’s “copy,” and finding it in the American negro. Such pictures as “The Carnival” and a “Visit from the Old Mistress” were the result. It was a genre interesting only in theme, for Homer’s workmanship was still without any great merit or impressiveness. He flung back to the American farmer for a subject, and then once more went to Gloucester to do schooners and ships. In 1873, while staying on Ten Point Island, in Gloucester Harbor, he had drawn some water-colors notable for their high light and their absence of shadow. They seemed to have some purely pictorial quality about them, but the illustrative motive was still behind them. He did not give up work for Harper’s Weekly until 1875, and it was 1880 before he finally abandoned all work for reproduction.
Up to this time Homer had not painted a single epoch-making picture. As Kenyon Cox quite truly says, had he died at forty he would have been unknown to fame. One might draw out the number of years and make them fifty without extravagance of statement. Indeed, it was not until he was sixty that he began to paint his pictures of barren coast and sea upon which his enduring fame must rest, though before that he had given indication in many pictures of fisherfolk, whither he was trending. The blood of his sailor ancestors was coming to the fore at last, and the sea was to be his main theme thereafter. If we believe in genius that is born rather than made, then that, too, began to crop out in his later life.
He went to Tynemouth, England, in 1881, and stayed there for two years in close contact with the fisher people of the coast. This produced a decided change in his art. The large, robust type of English fisher lass, the strongly built sailor in oilskins, appealed to him and remained with him. They were rugged, forceful people that well met his hard drawing and severe brush. There, too, he began picturing the gray sky and mist and sea of England. The heavy atmosphere that hangs like a pall upon the North Sea in stormy weather caught his fancy, and the gray-blue, gray-green waters gave him a new idea of color. The old airless, brick-colored picture of his early days was never taken up again. He dropped readily into cool grays, which in themselves were perhaps no nearer a fine color-harmony than his earlier hot colors, but at the least they were neutral and they were emphatically true of the sea in its stormy phases.
Even Homer’s rigid method of painting began to break a little at Tynemouth. He was working then in water-colors, and perhaps the lighter medium lent itself more readily to a freer handling. His brush loosened, his drawing seemed less angular, less emphasized in outline, and his composition became more a matter of selection and adjustment than of mere accidental appearance.
Mr. Cox, whose excellent monograph on Homer I am glad to quote,[7] thinks that Homer quite found himself at Tynemouth, and points out in the “Voice from the Cliff” his “rhythm of line” whereby he holds the three figures together; but I am not sure that Homer did not get a suggestion of that rhythm of line up in London town on his perhaps occasional visits there. A hint of the types of the fisher girls, the repeated lines of the arms and dresses, with the strength gotten from the repetition, I seem to remember in Leighton’s picture called the “Summer Moon.” Albert Moore, too, was turning out rhythmical repetitions at that time and using models that remind us somewhat of those used by Homer, though, of course, slighter and more fanciful. The fisher girls in the “Voice from the Cliff” and the “Three Girls” are a little too pretty to be wholly original with Homer, and yet it must be acknowledged that such water-colors as “Mending the Nets” and “Watching the Tempest” give warning of the coming man. The two women seated on a bench in the “Mending the Nets” are young-faced, large-boned, big-bodied types that have a sculpturesque quality about them; and the “Watching the Tempest” throws out a suggestion of the Homeric sea that is to be.
[7] Winslow Homer: An Appreciation, by Kenyon Cox, New York, 1914.