Painting: Chanties in Color

What Walt Whitman called “measureless oceans of space” swelled across the background of most 19th century U.S. painting. Whether seas of grass or prairies of briny waves, the American wilderness seemed to have only distant dimensions. The way to conquer that expanse was to shrink it to human scale and bring man to the foreground of the new nation’s wide horizons. Winslow Homer set out to bring the American vista into focus.

Image of Man. Unlike Western artists spellbound by the herculean Rockies, Homer mapped the more mercurial Eastern seacoast. From the Adirondack lakes, he followed streams in his fishing scenes down to where lonely dorymen bobbed on the icy Atlantic banks and sailors were blown through tropical cays. Ever present in Homer is the imminence of brewing nor’easters and hurricanes. But in fair weather or foul, Homer insisted on the image of man prevailing against nature.

Homer became one of the U.S.’s favorite artists; he still is. Last week exhibitions of his work opened at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., and Buffalo, N.Y.’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Despite his popularity, the artist quit New York City in 1883 for a wave-washed promontory in Maine called Prouts Neck. There the lifelong bachelor worked in a cliffside clapboard studio. Despite his old saltitude, he ordered his natty wardrobe from Brooks Brothers and purchased $40 worth of fine Jamaican rum a month from Boston’s fancy S. S. Pierce for his hourly tots. He maintained, despite his absence, membership in the rarefied Century Club. Preserved in the sea air, Homer died at 74 in 1910, irritated on his deathbed that he did not live longer than his father’s and grandfather’s 89 years.

That Duclc Pond. From the solemn solidity of his oils to the airy sprinkle of his watercolors (see opposite page), Homer made reality serve his intense colorism. From the late 1880s on, wherever he traveled, he snapped away with his Eastman Kodak No. 1. Using photos and drawing upon his early training as a lithographer, he captured actuality, studied its nature, and then bent it to his artist’s will. In The Lookout, Homer used a Maine neighbor, John Gatchell, as his oilskinned model. He rummaged junk shops to find the bell that served to symbolize a stalwart ship struggling across a boiling sea, only visible itself as a glimpse of whitecaps. It is a distant and different sea that splashes in watercolors in Shell Heap, with an angler bending to his catch while the breezy skies of Florida seem to whip palm fronds into an ominous rattle.

Yet it is still the sea—the element he came to know so familiarly that he could refer to it with the authority of a King Canute as “that duck pond.” Because of such mastery, his art sings chanties that help men endure and enjoy what they cannot control themselves.