The first week of the new year provided me the opportunity to visit an exhibition of paintings by Winslow Homer, at London’s National Gallery. His work is surprisingly under-appreciated on this side of the Atlantic: according to the catalogue, this is only the second exhibition ever held in Britain devoted to his work; furthermore, and shockingly, there is not a single work by Homer held in any UK public art collection, despite him spending over a year living and painting in England, near Tynemouth in 1881-2.
The image used to advertise the exhibition –- The Gulf Stream, 1899 – was a poor choice as it borders on cliché. A black man lies on the deck of a small boat, staring impassively to the horizon. The mast is broken, and a storm is fast approaching, yet he appears unconcerned. He is surrounded by symbols: a handful of loose sugar canes lie on the deck to remind us of the importance of the sugar trade and the slave economy that maintained it, although it is unclear why the sailor would have need sugar on this fishing trip; on the distant horizon there is a bigger sailing ship, another symbol of global trade, but probably too far away and too busy to come to his assistance; his damaged vessel is circled by three grey sharks, coloured to match the uniforms of the soldiers of The Confederacy; the sea is tinted with splashes of dark red, perhaps the blood of previous victims of sharks, or perhaps a sly reference to the poetry of the artist’s namesake, whose heroes once sailed over “wine-dark seas” of the Mediterranean. The nonchalance of this man in the face of nature’s threats divests the picture of emotional power. It presents a puzzle for the mind to decode rather than a pleasure for the eye to linger over.
By contrast, The Cotton Pickers 1876, held my attention for some time. In this painting, made when Homer was forty, the ambiguous expressions of the two figures provide a sharp contrast with the beauty of their environment. The sky is filled with gentle clouds, reflecting the placid light of early evening in yellow and pink tones; the landscape, framed on both sides by distant woodland, is a sea of cotton plants in full flower, through which young women workers walk home after a day of labour in the fields. Cotton, like sugar, is a crop that will forever be linked with the slave economy, but in this image, it functions not simply as a symbol of an unjust social order but also as a symbol of luxury and pleasure. The plants in the foreground are depicted impressionistically, suggesting the softness of the cotton flowers, soon to be transformed by machines into comfortable clothing and household wares. The background shows an expansive field bathed in sunshine, a golden lake indicative of the wealth of those who own the land and finance the commodity trade.
For all the craft and delicacy of the landscape, it is the two figures, both deep in thought, who hold the viewer’s attention. One looks down at the cotton flowers that she has spent her day picking, the other stares into the distance, and in both cases the expressions are hard and resolute, unlike the crop they carry home with them. The painting, set presumably in a southern state, was made just over a decade after the end of the Civil War, long enough for the euphoria of Emancipation to have faded, and the realities of Reconstruction to have become clear. These women might have been too young to have worked as slaves in the pre-war period, but they would certainly have known of its horrors from stories passed down by parents, siblings, and neighbours, and now they are old enough to experience first-hand the iniquities of the agrarian economy in which they will work for low wages until they grow old, without ever enjoying the full fruits of their labour, which are reserved to landowners and bankers. Homer’s painting does not invite pity, but respect for the dignified labour of those who have no other choices in life. This is a work of sympathy, not of symbolism.
Shortly after his return to the US from England, Homer painted The Life Brigade 1882. This picture is radically different from any other in the exhibition, both in terms of its formal composition and its colour palette. According to the exhibition notes, it is based on sketches Homer made of the volunteer lifeboat crew he observed when he lived on the north-east coast of England, and the image is supposed to suggest the sailors looking out towards a rough sea, anticipating the imminent dangers they face in their struggle with the forces of nature. Well, maybe. Except that the sea in this picture looks unlike the sea in any other painting in the exhibition: there is no swell, no towering green waves, no sense of threat. Instead, the water is a represented by a series of flat, horizontal, creamy-white lines, perhaps suggestive of white horses of surf, but equally of the sea becoming placid after a squall. They sky is represented by hatched brush marks of uniform grey, which might hint at a coming storm, but the lack of depth and variation of colour also suggests stability as dusk approaches. The foreground is flat, the sand pink in tone with pools of reflective light, and the four men stand in a group to one side, stationary like sentinels. They are framed by large blocks of brown, which might represent the sides of a buildings, or massive sea defences, but their scale and lack of detail or definition functions mainly to draw the viewers attention to the pink sand, white sea, and grey sky, that form the centre of the work.
Unlike Homer’s other paintings in this exhibition — which capture the wildness of the sea in motion, the strength of the wind, the thrills, and the risks of life at sea or close to the shore — this painting is calm, static, and timeless. Its character is less that of a seascape than a domestic interior, where four small figures have intruded unknowingly into a modernist still life painting. The colours reminded me of the work of Giorgio Morandi.
The Cotton Pickers was purchased by a British cotton merchant soon after it was painted and brought it to London, where it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1878. For some reason – alas — it did not stay in this country and has ended up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, while The Life Brigade normally hangs in a gallery in Minneapolis. I’m glad these works visited London recently but regret that his work is so rarely shown here.
Why is Winslow Homer not better known in England? The technical quality of his work varies, but this exhibition demonstrated that it is mostly good and certainly stands up well by comparison with work by British artists of the second half of the nineteenth century, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, which is found in most of the collections of major regional galleries and is enduringly popular with the public. Homer’s painting offers greater pictorial realism and a sharper social focus, and while many of his subjects might be of primarily historic interest today, some have a timeless quality, for example Sharpshooter 1863, painted during the Civil War, which resonates today with the threat of sniper fire during civil conflicts and urban warfare.
His painting style is very dissimilar to that of his French contemporaries. Homer’s paintings of the sea feel closer to the work of Turner than that of Monet, not least because his paintings of the sea are really about the sea, rather than being about the play of light upon the water. When he spent time in Bermuda, painting watercolours that capture the tropical light, there is a richness of colour in his flowers and fruits, but his work looks nothing like the paintings that Gauguin made in Tahiti at around the same time. Which is to say, perhaps, that his work represents a strong summation of the tradition of realist land- and seascape painting, that ran through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but is quite unlike the modernist reinvention of these genres that started in France with the work of Monet and Pissarro.
Homer is not the only American painter whose work is little known in Britain. If we consider the first half of the twentieth century, excepting Georgia O’Keefe and Edward Hopper, most American artists are poorly represented in public collections and hardly ever shown in retrospective exhibitions. There are one or two paintings – American Gothic or Christina’s World – that are well known, but little interest more generally in American artists from this period. When will Stuart Davis have an exhibition in London? From the late 1940s onwards, American art became international art, and the work of the major figures became widely known: Pollock, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Martin, Johns, Sherman, and Katz are all familiar to British audiences from major exhibitions, or from work in major collections. Or course this simply reflects the ability of New York’s leading art dealers and auction houses to set the agenda for national galleries and public collections in Europe. In art, as in agriculture and trade, the power of money holds sway.
Winslow Homer spent the last years of his life living and painting at Prouts Neck, a small peninsula on the Maine coast, not far from Scarborough, the home of this website. Homer’s home is also our home.