Of course these pictures are illustrative in a way of the Maine coast, but one does not think of them as such but rather as descriptive or creative. They are reports of the power of the sea, wonderful view-points of a great element. In that sense they are epic, tremendous characterizations, all-powerful statements that startle and command. You cannot get away from them. They fascinate, and yet are not attractive in the sense that you would like to have one of them in your drawing-room. They are elemental rather than ornamental. As Kenyon Cox well puts it, you might as well let the sea itself into your house as one of Homer’s sea-pictures. The picture would sweep everything before it, put everything else out of key, make a black spot on the wall, and continually irritate you with its harshness of method. From his youth upward Homer seems to have had a scorn for the decorative. Charm either in his personality or his art seems to have been a gift withheld by the fairy godmother. He had the giant’s strength and with it he had to accept the limitations of that endowment. The gentler side of the sea—the flat summer plains of glorious color and light—he did not care for, and even such features of the stormy sea as the flashing, foaming crests he could not do except in hard, immovable form. The crests in the “Woods Island Light” look like inlays of white marble on lapis lazuli. The bubbling surge full of color and evanescent as champagne was too charming, too lovely for him.
There were returns to the illustrative during his later years in such pictures as “The Wreck,” “Kissing the Moon,” and in Adirondack scenes, but by 1900 he had reached his apogee and thereafter changed little. He was not to break out any new sails. Nor was there need of it. His great ability and originality had been abundantly displayed and universally recognized by both painter and public. Honors, enough and to spare, were his. In 1893, at Chicago, he had been awarded the gold medal, and everything that art societies could do or artists and critics could say had been done and said. Up at Prout’s Neck, where he had shut the door after him and kept it closed for so many years, these echoes of the world’s recognition were received with indifference. Miss Mechlin quotes from a letter of his in 1907:
“Perhaps you think I am still painting and interested in art. That is a mistake. I care nothing for art. I no longer paint. I do not wish to see my name in print again.”
He wrote that perhaps on one of his bad days, for he did take up the brush again, but with no great spirit or effectiveness. In 1908 he was seriously ill and quite helpless, but he insisted upon living on in his lonely house with entrance forbidden to all but his brother’s family. And there quite by himself he died in September, 1910. He had lived a strange life, produced a strong art, and then died, like a wolf, in silence.
One often wonders regarding such a character as Winslow Homer what would have been the result if the strange in both his life and his art had been eliminated. Would it have helped matters or would his strength have been dissipated thereby? And wherein lay the strangeness of Homer if not that he never inherited a single social or artistic tradition nor would adopt one in later life? He made his own manners and his own methods, in life as in art, with the result that in both he was always a rough diamond. He never received anything of importance by teaching or training. Culture of mind and hand, emotional feeling or romance, were practically unknown to him. He was as far removed from romanticism as classicism, and cared nothing about any of the isms of art. We keep flinging back to an early conclusion that he was a wonderful reporter rather than an interpreter, a reporter who saw unusual things in the first place and reported them with unusual characterization in the second place. The result was about the largest nature truths of our day. Truth was his avowed aim—the plain unvarnished truth. He never intentionally departed from it.
Homer is an excellent illustration of what a man cannot do entirely by himself. With his initial force and his keen vision he could make a very powerful report. Had he been educated, taught restraint and method, given a sense of style, schooled in decorative value, he might have risen to the great gods of art. But perhaps not. Even pedagogues, in their late years, begin to doubt the worth of training. It might have ruined Winslow Homer. Yet, nevertheless, it is the thing that his admirers always feel the lack of in his pictures. He has no comeliness of style, no charm of statement, no grace of presentation. To the last he is a barbarian for all that we may feel beneath his brush
“the surge and thunder of the ‘Odyssey.’”
Unfortunately, much of Homer’s barbarism of the brush lives after him while his splendid vision and stubborn character are in danger of being interred with his bones. He himself has become a tradition, a master to be imitated, for though he founded no school and had no pupils, a great many young painters in America have been influenced by his pictures. The majority of these young men have concluded that Homer’s strength lay in the rawness and savagery of his method; they have not gripped the fact that his compelling force was a matter of mind rather than of hand. An imitator can always be counted upon to clutch at a mannerism and neglect a mentality. So it is that many a young art student of to-day, with just enough imagination to conjure up an apple-blossom landscape is painting with the crude color and gritty brush of Homer, thinking thereby to get something “strong.”
What a dreadful mistake! A surly surface of heaped-up paint minus the drawing that is Homer! And the juvenile error of supposing that the knowledge of a lifetime can be picked up and handed out by a glib imitator in the few hours of a summer afternoon! The attempt presupposes art to be merely a conjurer’s trick—a supposition that history does not sustain.
Homer cannot be counted fortunate in his followers. Accepting a surface appearance of strength as the all-in-all of art, they have abandoned grace of form with charm of color—flung the decorative to the winds. We are now asked to admire this or that because it is “real” or “just as I saw it,” or “absolutely true”—as though such apologies in themselves were sufficient reasons for fine art. But Homer long before he died withdrew to Prout’s Neck and abandoned his fellows of the brush. He no doubt thought them quite hopeless. Perhaps there was reason behind his thinking.