Water-Colours by Winslow Homer

The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeHarvard Art Museum

Water-Colours by Winslow HomerAuthor(s): Arthur PopeSource: Notes (Fogg Art Museum), Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jun., 1926), pp. 43-48Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College on behalf of Harvard Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4300836 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 11:57

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The President and Fellows of Harvard College and Harvard Art Museum are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Notes (Fogg Art Museum).

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.79 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:57:27 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=pfhc

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=huam

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4300836?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


WINSLOW HOMER. BOATS, KEY WEsr



WATER-COLOURS BY WINSLOW HOMER

THE three paintings by Winslow Homer reproduced herewith belong to the fine series of water-colours executed in the nineties and early nineteen hundreds when he was at the very " top notch" of his powers. His unaffected directness and precision of handling, his solidity in rendering space, and his finality in design are all shown here at their very best. Un- fortunately there is no room in the present museum building where these pictures can be adequately shown; they have to be crowded over into a corner of a combined office and classroom sufficiently far removed from the window so that there will be no danger of direct sunlight striking them, but where there is finally little light to see them. In connection with the new museum building the writer is looking forward almost more than to anything else to the satisfactory exhibition of the splendid collection of water-colours and drawings belonging to the Mu- seum, many of which can not be shown now at all. In the present instance the two Canadian subjects belong to the permanent collection of the Museum, purchased from the Bettens fund; the Key West subject belongs to the Director, but it is frequently on exhibition at the Museum, and it can always be seen by special request.

One of the outstanding qualities of Winslow Homer's work is its vigorous sense of reality. It is often assumed that this is due to the fact that he

43



frequently took great pains even in the case of his large oil pictures to paint directly from nature. As a matter of fact he never worked from nature in a literal or merely imitative fashion, and I am inclined to think that a large part of his decision in expres- sion and finality in design, as contrasted with the work of most contemporary painters, was due to his long years of training in drawing and painting from memory or rather from imagination on the basis of well developed visual memory. All through his earlier career Homer worked as an illustrator, principally for Harper's Weekly. The drawings made for this purpose have now but little artistic significance in themselves, but they afforded the best possible training for the memory, and I doubt if without that training anything like the subtlety of action in the figures or the sense of movement in water exhibited in his later works would have been possible. Furthermore, it was by this use of imagination and memory that Homer was able to present his essential subject so forcibly and directly. He selected just the necessary facts and treated them with just the appropriate amount of emphasis to accompany and reenforce his main theme. In this respect his painting forms an interesting and instruc- tive contrast to that of a painter like Sargent, who may in fact be thought of as the "arch-imitator." Unquestionably Sargent had much greater facility and native talent than Homer, and in their brilliant handling his paintings have usually a striking super- ficial resemblance to natural effect that is lacking in Homer; but in Sargent there is almost an extreme

44



WINSLOW HOMER. CANOE IN RAPIDS



WINSLOW HOMER. FISHING IN THE ADIRONDACKS



lack of selection, and hence none of Homer's finality. Sargent's portraits, for example, have a way of looking old-fashioned the minute the clothes which his sitters wear go out of fashion, like pictures in old magazines. The arrangement seems accidental. Everything is taken as it comes without selection. The same thing is true of his landscapes. I always want to see Sargent water-colours in a row, where I can pass quickly from the excitement of one to that of the next, without stopping too long to con- sider any individual picture. By themselves they are often disappointing. But with Winslow Homer at his best, and he was often at his best, there seems to be no accident; everything is right from begin- ning to end - completely satisfying -final.

I suppose no painters of recent times have achieved more complete sense of reality than Homer and Degas - one completely French, the other completely American. It is curious though really not surprising that no other modern painters have depended so much on memory and imagination. Furthermore, Degas derived a large part of his understanding of design from the study of the great masters of the Renaissance, and I can not help won- dering if Homer was so completely unaffected by the sight of the great masterpieces in London and Paris as is ordinarily supposed, for he visited Paris when he was thirty-one, an age when a strong per- sonality might naturally be expected to select just what was of significance for the development of his own art, without being affected in a merely super- ficial way by mannerisms of other painters. At

47



least I do not believe that it is possible to affirm, as is sometimes done, that he was entirely unaffected by European art, just because he made no copies in the Louvre. A painter may look hard and store away ideas in the back of his head, perhaps as if he were painting, without ever touching pencil or brush - in fact that is what a real student of painting is doing all the time. The individuality and Frenchiness of Degas was only strengthened and made articulate by his study of the great masters. It is at least possible that something of the same sort was of the utmost importance in making Homer one of the great masters of Western painting.

Turning to the subdued colour of Winslow Hom- er's paintings, from the increasingly strident effects sought for in modern painting, one wonders if we are not almost due for a reaction against the exaggera- tions of much modern colouring. After all, force is not everything; without relief it becomes tire- some and monotonous. The painting of Winslow Homer shows that it is possible to get convincing sense of space and feeling of out-of-door light, even of the sparkle of sunlight, as in the Key West subject, without the least exaggeration of colour in- tensities. Homer even does not hesitate to use a black pigment, something which the modern painter avoids like poison. A reaction toward a variation of the tenebroso manner would seem the next logical step in the artistic program for somebody that wants to make a sensation. Happily XVinslow Homer only sought to produce good pictures, not sensations.

ARTHUR POPE 48



Documents

Water-Colours by Winslow Homer