Ubiquitous Winslow Homer images of the surf-battered, rocky Maine coastline and pastoral scenes of American life in a simpler time, are so deeply embedded in our sense of national identity that we hardly ‘see’ them any longer. Too many posters of youths in fields and boats, stalwart, wind-swept women gazing out to sea, and gallant sailors reckoning with nature’s wrath have numbed us to the applied skill and visionary genius of Homer’s oeuvre. After a multi-year conservation/renovation process, the Portland Museum of Art has recently opened Homer’s carefully-restored Prout’s Neck studio, just twelve miles from the museum, itself, in Scarborough. To commemorate this important event, a concurrent exhibit features some of his best-known works—38 major oils, watercolors and etchings created during his tenure at the studio—during the last three decades of his life (1883-1910). Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine, is on view through December 30, 2012. The Prout’s Neck Studio is a permanent part of the museums collection and is now available for tours. artes fine arts magazine

Weatherbeaten explores the range and complexity of Homer’s mature artistic vision, which came to fruition at his Prout’s Neck studio, part of a family compound, including the home of his brother and other members of his highly entrepreneurial family. Literally perched on the edge of the sea, the studio offers views of the cold Atlantic to the east and is just steps down a narrow path, winding its way to the tattered shelves of wave-worn granite, made famous in so many of his marine paintings. For Homer, this was more than a studio space in which to paint; it served as a repository for his imagination, fueled by the immediacy of the sounds and smells of sea, so nearby. But it also provided him with endless subject matter to demonstrate his abilities as a master of his craft—one that had taken years to perfect. Born in Boston, Mass., in 1836, Homer was raised in then-rural Cambridge. His mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist and Homer’s first teacher. He took on many of her traits, including her quiet, strong-willed, terse, sociable nature; her dry sense of humor; and her artistic talent, which was evident in his early years.

Homer’s apprenticeship at the age of 19 to J. H. Bufford, a Boston commercial lithographer, was a formative, but “treadmill experience.” He worked repetitively on sheet music covers and other commercial work for two years. By 1857, his freelance career was underway after he turned down an offer to join the staff of Harper’s Weekly. “From the time I took my nose off that lithographic stone”, Homer later stated, “I have had no master, and never shall have any.”

Left: Winslow Homer, his dog Sam, and his father, Charles Savage Homer, at Prout’s Neck, Maine (1890-1895). Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of the Homer Family.

Homer’s career as an illustrator lasted nearly twenty years. He contributed illustrations of Boston life and rural New England life to magazines such as Ballou’s Pictorial and Harper’s Weekly, at a time when the market for illustrations was growing rapidly, and when fads and fashions were rapidly changing. His early works, mostly commercial engravings of urban and country social scenes, are characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrast of light and dark and lively figure groupings—qualities that remained important throughout his career. Homer’s quick success was due mostly to his strong understanding of graphic design and the adaptability of his layouts to wood engraving.

After only a few years of self-training, and a brief stint at New York’s National Academy of Design, Homer was producing excellent oil work. His mother tried to raise family funds to send him to Europe for further study, but instead, Harper’s sent Homer to the front lines of the Civil War, where he sketched battle scenes and camp life. Although his drawings did not get much attention at the time, they exemplified Homer’s expanding skills from illustrator to painter. As in his urban scenes, Homer illustrated women during war time, showing its effects on the home front. Following the war, Homer would re-focus his artistic vision on a series of war-related paintings, based on his sketches, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty (1862). Taking up oils again, the artist’s works was characterized by the weight and density he exploited from that medium. He worked also extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid, prolific body of work, primarily chronicling his working vacations.

“You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors,” Homer once remarked, and he was almost right. He came to the medium late: he was thirty-seven and a mature artist. A distinct air of the Salon—a desire for a “major” utterance leading to an overworked surface—clings to some of the painter’s early watercolors; in particular, the oil paintings of fisher folk he painted during a twenty-month stay in the northern English coastal village of Cullercoats, in 1881-82. Those peasant girls, simple, natural, wind-beaten and enduring, planted in big boots with arms akimbo against the planes of sea, rock and sky, also evoke of a kind of moralizing earnestness, common to French Salon art a century ago. Idealization of the peasant and rural living—reflecting an anxiety that folk culture was being annihilated by the gravitational pull of the city—was the stock-in-trade of dozens of European painters, including Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage and Jean-François Millet.

Homer’s own America had anxieties, too—immense ones! Nothing in its cultural history is more striking, though,than a virtual absence of any mention of that central American trauma of the nineteenth century, the Civil War, in paintings from during and the post-bellum era. Portraying the devastation and cultural division was left to writers (like Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane), and photographers (like Matthew Brady), to explore. But painting, itself, served as an emotional salve and respite from unpleasantness—a means to recapture or reconstruct an idealized innocence. Homer’s 1870s watercolors of farm children and bucolic courtships memorialize the pre-war, halcyon days of the 1850s. Many of his best-known works are, in a sense, an effort to retrieve images of a lost America, which may well account for their continuing appeal in our anxiety-ridden 21st century. But none of this was lost on Homer’s critics at the time, who saw such works as an unvarnished, and in some ways, disagreeable truth. Of some of Homer’s best-known works today, Henry James commented, “We frankly confess that we detest his subjects. They are barbarously simple. He has chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier; and, to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded.”

Homer was not, of course, the first artist to focus on rural life in America, but he was the undisputed master of the genre, bringing to it both intense observation and a sense of identification with the landscape—just as nineteenth century popular opinion was shifting from notions of the American wilderness as the sanctified domain of God—nature’s sublime wilderness ‘church’—to the secular ‘outdoors,’ a vast theater-of-operation where tourism and recreation were increasingly available to an emerging, urban middle class. Thoreau’s existential America was rapidly becoming Teddy Roosevelt’s federally-funded national parks.

But, in the opinion of its organizer, Thomas Denenberg, Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine, reassesses this banal view of the power of the artist’s perspective to offer something new—even to the most jaded observer. As he points out, “Tourists make demands upon the environment that quickly undermine the promise of authentic experience…As one watering hole becomes too popular, those in the know move on to places where the promise of a rugged view is extended. Weatherbeaten (the show’s title painting [see opening image] and the exhibition) is a way of understanding the sea change in popular perception of the New England coast underway in the decades that bracketed the turn of the century. Prior to Homer’s final confrontation with the timeless drama playing out on the rocks before his studio at Prout’s Neck, the region had been, to use the art historian Sarah Burns’s phrase, ‘painted out.’ The penchant for the artists and writers to frame New England as a nostalgic landscape marked by aged gentility—burnished at best, more often hoary—engendered a popular notion that the region was past its prime. Autumn landscapes, weathered buildings, even the quiescence of the waves in seascapes of the 1870s suggested a calm, halcyon perception of place in the decade following the Civil War. In contrast, Homer’s Prout’s Neck paintings of the 1890s—the apogee of a career dedicated to firsthand experience, observation and the mastery of the visual narrative—injected vitality, even virility, back into the New England scene.”

Homer is certainly considered one of the great masters of the watercolor medium. He first painting with watercolors on a regular basis in 1873, during a summer stay in Gloucester, Massachusetts. From the beginning, his technique was natural, fluid and confident, demonstrating his innate talent for a challenging medium. His impact would be revolutionary. Once again, the critics were puzzled, “A child with an ink bottle could not have done worse.” Another critic said that Homer “made a sudden and desperate plunge into water color painting”. But his watercolors proved popular and enduring, and sold readily, improving his financial condition considerably. They varied from highly detailed to broadly impressionistic. Some watercolors were made as preparatory sketches for oil paintings andothers, as finished works themselves. Thereafter, he seldom traveled without paper, brushes and water based paints.

As a result of disappointments with women or from some other emotional turmoil, Homer became reclusive in the late 1870s, no longer enjoying urban social life, and living instead in Gloucester. For a time, he even lived in the secluded Eastern Point Lighthouse (with the keeper’s family). In re-establishing his love of the sea, Homer found a rich source for themes in closely observing the fishermen, the sea, and the marine weather. After 1880, he rarely featured genteel women at leisure, focusing rather, on working women.

In 1883, Homer moved to his family’s Prout’s Neck estate—a remodeled carriage house, just seventy-five feet from the ocean. Through the mid-1880s, Homer painted his monumental sea scenes. Saved (1889), an image that earlier appeared as the painting, The Life Line, portrays the dramatic rescue of a female by an anonymous male. The viewer is left to imagine the nature of the emergency or its likely outcome. A wind-blown cloth obscuring the face of the would-be hero makes him ‘Everyman’ in this drama, a metaphorical treatment of woman’s vulnerability, and man’s gallantry on turbulent seas.

Left: The Life Line (1884). Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection.

In Eight Bells (1886), two sailors carefully take their bearings on deck, calmly appraising their position and, by extension, their relationship with the sea. They are confident in their seamanship, but respectful of the forces before them, leaving doubt in the mind of the viewer about their ultimate fate. As with many of his works, the Boston Herald of the day commented, “[Homer had] the ability to capture the titanic and terrible aspects of nature.” And as contemporaneous commentator Rupert Holland noted, “a vigor and independence, and absolute honesty of presentation…of the mighty bulwarks of rock that defend the land from invasion [by the sea].”Homer effectively captured the perilous, fragile alliance between man and the relentless, indifferent forces of nature. His paintings served as metaphors for the fragile alliance of the individual in an increasingly urbanized, industrialized, late-19th century world.

Above right: Eight Bells (1886). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. Gift of anonymous donor.

By age fifty, Homer had become a “Yankee ‘Robinson Crusoe,” cloistered on his art island” and “a hermit with a brush.” In his Prout’s Neck pictures, the artist envisioned nature as an arena for a constant clash of forces—water against rock, man against the elements. Two other paintings on display, High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894), and West Point, Prout’s Neck (1900), capture this elemental drama of nature through closely-observed depictions of the seashore in varyious seasons and conditions. His iconic painting, Fox Hunt (1893) is a Darwinian-inspired metaphorical work, reflecting themes of mortality and evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest that pre-occupied many in the late 19th century. These paintings established Homer, as the New York Evening Post wrote, “in a place by himself, as the most original and one of the strongest of American painters.”

The restored Studio is an evocative symbol for Homer’s relationship to the sea, viewed by historians as the platform from which he launched his most ‘modern’ and introspective work. It is impossible to tour the site without having one’s attention drawn to the views of the Atlantic from nearly every window. Scholarship and care are evidenced throughout the two-story space, including a scrupulously-preserved, pencil-scrawled note on a tongue-and-groove paneled wall by Homer himself, “Oh, what a friend chance can be when it chooses,” and the faintly-incised word “Winslow” on an otherwise unremarkable window pane. Care has been taken to call attention to many of the personal possessions that were part of Homer’s life, including a humorous, hand-painted sign declaring, “Snakes…Snakes…Mice!” conspicuously placed at the entrance to the property to keep away the curious and unwelcome.

Objects representing Homer’s everyday life are abundant: his library; cooking equipment; ‘lunch flag,’ to run up a pole every time he wanted the local hotel to deliver his meal; benches; chairs and assorted memorabilia. More evidence of Homer, the artist, may still be needed in the building to fully realize the Studio as a meaningful experience for visitors. A flat-screen monitor designed to look like an artist’s canvas has been placed in the second floor painting room, to offer a contrast between photographs of specific sites and Homer’s painted interpretations. This high-tech solution imparts information, but not the spirit of the artist, alive and working in his studio. A cordoned-off section with working easel, a painting in progress, perhaps a drop cloth, a table scattered with tubes of paints, brushes and sketches—all facsimiles modeled after the original, for sure—would offer the visitor a sense that Homer is still ‘there,’ but perhaps just stepped out of the room momentarily. The space is beautifully and thoughtfully restored, but still seems a bit austere, vacated by the foot-fall and breath of the artist; with little physical manifestation, at Prout’s Neck particularly, of what this landmark space represents—Winslow Homer’s art in the act of being created.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine was organized by Thomas Denenberg, former Chief Curator at the Portland Museum of Art and current Director of the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont. Karen Sherry, Curator of American Art at the Portland Museum of Art, is the in-house curator. The exhibition remains on display until December 30, 2012.

Visit the museum site at www.portlandmuseum.org