Homer remains a figure in our American culture through his feeling for reality. He has learned through slavery to detail to put down the essential fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He has a little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none whatever of his sense of the imaginative. It was enough for him to classicize the realistic incident. He impels me to praise through his yankee insistence upon integrity. Story is story with Homer and he leaves legend to itself. It is the narrative of the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and typical. He never stepped outside of his yankee determination. Homer has sent the art of water colour painting to a very high place in world consideration. He cannot be ignored as a master in this field. His paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings of fact, dramatically considered. He offers nothing else. Once you have seen these realistic sea pictures, you may want to remember and you may want to forget, but they call for consideration. They are true in their living appreciation of reality.
He knew the sea like the old salts that were his neighbors, and from accounts he was as full of the tang of the sea as they. He was a foe to compromise and a despiser of imposition. The best and most impersonal of him is in his work, for he never ventured to express philosophies, ethics, or morals in terms of picture-painting. That is to his credit at least. He was concerned with illustration first and last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. He taught the proceeding school of illustrators much in the significance of verity, and in the ways and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. What the stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold engravings of his time taught him, he conferred upon the later men in terms of freedom of technique. And at the same time he rose a place, as painter and artist of no mean order, by a certain distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here it was necessary by virtue of the limitations of the medium.
Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time only because his mind was too local. There is nothing of universal appeal in him. His realism will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces of Courbet, and I shall include Ryder as well. Courbet was a fine artist, and so was Ryder, and both had the advantage of exceptional imagination. Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast and typify excellently the two poles in the New England temper, both in art and in life. Homer as realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate realism as best he could in the most distinguished terms at the disposal of his personality. He succeeded admirably.
Homer typifies a certain sturdiness in the American temper at least, and sends the lighter men away with his roughness, as doubtless he sent the curious away from his cliffs with the acidity of truth he poured upon them. He had lived so much in the close association of the roughest elements in existence, rocks and the madly swinging sea that glides over and above them defiantly, that he had without doubt taken on the character of them. The portrait of Homer gives him as one would expect him to look, and he looks like his pictures. His visage bore a ferocity that had to be met with a rocky certainty. It is evident there was no fooling him. He was filled with yankee tenacity and yankee courage. Homer is what you would expect to find if you were told to hunt up the natives of "Prout's Neck" or "Perkins Cove," or any of the inlets of the Maine coast. These sea people live so much with the roughness of the sea, that if they are at all inclined to acidity, and the old fashioned yankee was sure to be, they take on the hard edges of a man's temper in accordance with the jaggedness of the shores on which they live. The man around the rocks looks so very like the profiles one sees in the rocks themselves. They have absorbed the energy of the dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be sure that life around the sea in New England is no easy existence; and they give out the same salty equivalent in human association.
If you have lived by the sea, you have learned the significance of the bravery of sea people, and you learn to understand and excuse the sharpness of them which is given them from battle with the elemental facts they are confronted with at all times. That is the character of Homer, that is the quality of his painting. That is what makes him original in the American sense, and so recognizable in the New England sense. He is one of New England's strongest spokesmen, and takes his place by the side of Ryder, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Whittier, and such representative temperaments, and it is this quality that distinguishes him from men like Inness, Wyant, and the less typical painters. It is obvious, too, that he never painted any other coast, excepting of course Florida, in the water colours.
It was Florida that produced the chef d'œuvre in him. It was Maine that taught him the force of the southern aspect. Romancer among the realistic facts of nature, he might be called, for he did not merely copy nature. He did invest things with their own suggestive reality, and he surmounted his earlier gifts for exact illustration by this other finer gift for romantic appreciation. Homer was an excellent narrator, as will be seen in the "Gulf Stream" picture in the Metropolitan Museum. It has the powers of Jack London and of Conrad in it. Homer was intense, vigorous, and masculine. If he was harsh in his characteristics, he was one who knew the worth of economy in emotion. He was one with his idea and his metier, and that is sufficient.
AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING
There are certain painters who join themselves together in a kind of grouping, which, whether they wish to think of themselves in this light or not, have become in the matter of American values in painting, a fixed associative aspect of painting in America. When we speak of American painting, the choice is small, but definite as to the number of artists, and the type of art they wished themselves to be considered for. From the Hudson River grouping, which up to Inness is not more marked than as a set of men copying nature with scrupulous fidelity to detail, rather than conveying any special feeling or notion of what a picture of, or the landscape itself, may convey; and leaving aside the American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome, most of whom returned with a rich sense of rhetorical conventionalities in art—men like William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston—we may turn to that other group of men as being far more typical of our soil and temper. I mean artists such as Homer Martin, Albert P. Ryder, George Fuller, and the later Winslow Homer who certainly did receive more recognition than any of them prior to his death.