Arts and Letters

Winslow Homer was a great personal force poured into a single channel. He was a painter by instinct and by intention. He was born in Boston in 1836, and spent his boyhood in Cambridge, which was then a New England village with open spaces ample for the out-of-door activities of a vigorous boy. Unusual skill as a draftsman gave him pleasure and training in childhood, and at the age of nine-teen he was doing the artistic work of a lithographer's office. Two years later he was making illustrations; and in 1859 he had his own studio in New York, worked in the night class of the Academy of Design, and learned from Rondel how to set his palette and handle his brushes. His chance for original work came with the Army of the Potomac in 1865; and the series of pictures which he put on canvas, including Prisoners from the Front, made a deep impression by their vigorous technic and unaffected human feeling. From this direct dealing with the facts of life, Homer's work gained its distinctive note in American painting. He was an authentic and authoritative recorder of three or four phases of American life; daringly intimate, sincere, and frank. Largely self-educated, and unaffected by European associations, he was a painter of the New World whose clear vision made him an uncompromising truth-teller, and whose powerful imagination and vigorous technic emphasized his rugged strength. His studies of army life, of the massive ocean front of Maine, of Adirondack scenery, of men of elemental occupation and vigor,—sailors, soldiers, farmers, teamsters, negroes,—showed uncompromising fidelity to the fact vitally presented. He was an open-air, out-of-door painter of real men in primitive occupations and experiences; but his range was neither narrow nor one-sided. His later work was dramatic, powerful, at times almost brutal; but in earlier life he painted landscapes of idyllic and shimmering charm, combining at times the most vivid realism with the subtle skill that records the stir of the wind and the translucence of diffused sunlight.

No American painter has surpassed him in the ease with which he lifts great waves and sends them crashing against the rocks with a force that fills the imagination with a deafening roar. Vigorous composition, bold use of color, passion for the elemental struggles of strong men, nature in moments of intense action, lay well within Homer's art; and to him was given the power to paint "the surge and thunder of the Odyssey." His nature was in the tone of his art: he was fearless, independent, unconventional, and loyal.