Art: Looking Out

All artists try to paint what they see, but some look inside themselves for subjects, some look out. Winslow Homer, who died in 1910, was one who looked out. His huntsman’s eyes, above the hairy battlement of his mustache, saw the world his contemporaries saw, but saw it more sharply. “When I have selected the thing carefully,” he explained, “I paint it exactly as it appears.”

The huge retrospective show of Homer’s art which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week proved that Homer didn’t mean exactly what he said. Every painting in the show demonstrated the complexity of design and the unobtrusive tricks of simplification and emphasis which mark a sophisticated artist. The show also proved again that Homer was one of America’s few 19th Century greats.

Born & bred in Boston, the self-taught son of a hardware dealer, Homer sold his first drawings to Harper’s Weekly at 21, went on to become a crack pictorial reporter of the Civil War and to record postwar life in the U.S. from New England farmyards to fashionable Long Branch, N. J. But he found his best subjects, and painted best, in solitude.

At 48 Homer turned his narrow back on the world, to spend his remaining 26 years alone in a storm-racked house on the Maine coast. “The Sun will not rise, or set,” he wrote contentedly to a friend, “without my notice, and thanks.” His thanks were fathoms-deep seascapes and the flashing watercolors—mostly painted on hunting trips into the north woods and winter excursions to the Bahamas—on which his fame now rests.

The New York Sun’s Critic Henry McBride came away from last week’s show convinced that Homer “is our best man, the one who puts most into pictures of that which Americans have got out of life . . . believe me it is a show. Attendance at it should be made compulsory by law. It would strengthen the country.”