Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Winslow Homer
American; 19th-century, 20th-century
Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Exhibition: Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor)
85%
Woodsman and Fallen Tree. 1891. Watercolor over graphite
The tree in this watercolor serves the same function as the tree in Homer's Adirondacks painting in Seattle — it plunges into and thereby activates the gut of the image while also, as it ramifies out from there, holding every depicted plane back from the paper's actual surface — but it does so with uncommon decision and economy, making this the better artwork. (In fact, it's among Homer's greatest watercolors.) There are four or five distinct painted surfaces here which that tree is cutting through and forcing down into pictorial depth: foreground leaflitter; fleshtoned hill crest; mountain slope in navy; turbid clouds; sky. Watercolor allowed Homer to sharply distinguish each of his planes from the others (look at how crisp the upper edge of the hill is!) while also infinitely differentiating them within themselves (look at how many worlds of red there are in the leaves up front!). Atop this, that fallen tree is like a cage: those five wedged surfaces and all of Homer's handling are locked up behind it — but less like a prisoner than a beast at the zoo. Homer's best paintings, like this one, manage to domesticate his facture by way of compositions that are like padlocks. But there needs to be an undercutting lightness to them, too. See the way the two upper branches on the log poke through the clouds and up into the atmosphere, the higher one just about grazing the picture's upper limit. (TFS, 2025)
Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Exhibition: Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor)
83%
Driftwood. 1909. Oil on canvas
The gleam of the varnish (shades of Asher Durand) does this painting no favors, but otherwise it's a top-tier work by this artist. It's doing the classic Homer thing of tightly interlocking and slightly layering so many discrete planes as they recede into the belly of the image, such that, no matter how embodied his objects seem or how palpable his brushwork gets, there's always a sort of protective screen between the surface of his paintings and the illusions they peddle. Look at the sailor, wedged between the log before him and that crop of rocks behind; or at the waves crashing into the little inlet, shoved forward by the jetty but backward by the driftwood and so hovering, it seems, somewhere just behind the real threshold of the picture. This procedure of Homer's allowed for his extravagances in color and handling: he would have been like a Soutine, violently throwing down paint without tether to propriety or his medium's past, were it not for the way his images can seem to hold themselves back from the way he painted them. Homer painted barbarously (especially the foam of his waves), yet it was always somehow in service of depiction; his colors rollick (look at those orange at right just above the middle of the scene, or the various dashes of teal enlivening the waves), yet they always settle somewhere (there's orange too in the log up front). To put this all very simply, we relish this painting for how precariously it's been painted, but we're allowed to relish it because of how seriously (almost protectively) it's been arranged. (TFS, 2025)
Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Exhibition: Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor)
78%
The Sponge Diver. 1898-99. Watercolor over graphite
This watercolor loses its grip in the bottom third or so, where it's just Homer daubing out waves. His daubs are nice, of course, but they don't have as much weight behind them as they tend to when they're, say, describing objects like the boat or the diver's back. (The latter is among Homer's great strokes of tonal genius.) The top two thirds of this piece, however, is as good as Homer ever got. That's partly because of the way the swimmer/boat tableau zigs rightward into the picture while the jetty-as-horizon-line in the distance zags the opposite way (but never quite reaches the picture's left edge). It's partly due, too, to how well Homer has managed the openness of the left half of the scene: unlike the picture's bottom portion, it's just punctuated enough (by the boat, the lighthouse, and the dollops of clouds) to scaffold Homer's handling without detracting from its freedom. And lastly, there's a strange formal rhyme between the boat and the uncolored patch of water just beneath it: the latter even has a horizontal stripe running through it, just like the flank of the skiff. This seems to be a purely visual, asemic flourish that just generally pulls things together. (TFS, 2025)
Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Exhibition: Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor)
78%
Long Branch, New Jersey. 1869. Oil on canvas
Everything in this painting comes back to that rectangle of dune that slopes from the canvas's center towards the bottom right corner of the image, where it's held inside the scene by an arc of beach shacks. The dune is sensitively painted: streaks of tan sand cutting through cream to meld with browns and blacks and, lower down, dappled rust. Homer seems to have known that such an indulgence in pure painting as this would require some countervailing pictorial structure — hence the whole rest of the painting, which serves to pin the dune in place. There's the way, for instance, the broad side of that upper shack calls out across the sand to the hidden face of the cliff, bracketing the dune in depth; there's the downward force of the sky on the dead-flat horizon line, which sort of seems to scrunch up the bottom half of the picture; there's the curve of vacationers echoing the swoop of those buildings at the base of the bluffs, which introduces some structure from above as well as below. Homer would go on to refine his methods for tightening up his pictures in spite of — or rather, to justify — the looseness of his handling, but this early (if maybe overbusy) success contains his whole style in kernel. (TFS, 2025)
Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery
74%
An Adirondack Lake. 1870. Oil on canvas
What this painting is all about is that horizontal band of lake, pink and blue, that cinches the scene at just below its center. It looks a bit like the way Kensett painted his lakes, all hard and still but somehow also set far back behind the picture plane, so that its (the water's) flatness couldn't ever be confused with that of the painting's surface... and yet they're both surfaces all the same... Homer's done a lot to push that plane way back into the painting's space: not just the composition's marquee feature — that inward-shooting log — but also various other twigs and lake-plants, those shrubs at right, the stock-still backlit oarsmen at center, all throw your eye out into the middle distance, where you hit the water like it's a wall and fall flat on your visual ass. This is a classic Homer effect. If there's anything to chide this painting for, however, it's that it's a bit uneconomical. Was every element of this tableau really required to harden up the lake and isolate it in space? Probably not. (TFS, 2025)
Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Exhibition: Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor)
68%
Girls on a Cliff. 1881. Watercolor over graphite
This watercolor is bisected diagonally, and the collision of its halves — ground and sky (the upturned right triangle of ocean in the low corner belongs to the latter) — is focalized by those two girls, pyramidal, just to the left and up from center. It wasn't uncommon for Homer in his paintings to wedge a figure or figures between two planes, but the singularity and the intensity with which he's done so here is special. (Homer's watercolors, which he dashed off quickly, often rely on a sole conceit like this; such directness fits their scale and the suggestive nature of their medium.) The girls are pinned there, pressed between those two frank planes, yet they don't lose any of their fullness of form for how fixed they are in place, almost smushed between back- and foreground. What I think this does, the girls' corporality despite their compression between air and earth, is carry the eye away from all of Homer's indulgent handling: his scratched and pooling grass and dirt, that blotted sky. There was disorder to the way Homer painted, but his arrangements were, at their best, things of control. They were measured and order-imposing. In this watercolor's case, the ordering element (the girls) is just a little too slender for how frolicsome the rest of the picture is, especially the whole bottom left quadrant. (Not to say that there's nothing worthwhile in Homer's extravagance with his paint. But without proper governance his handling alone is seldom more than merely delightful.) (TFS, 2025)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
63%
The Country School. 1871. Oil on canvas
What's amazing about Homer (even in a middling work like this) is how, despite the violence of his handling and the intensity of his accents and the terse unaccountability of his tonal language, each and every object in his paintings tends to settle in perfectly to pictorial space. Here, the books and the practice slates on the desks, all of the children, the splayed fan above the blackboard, the blackboard itself — it's as if everything has been pasted into (almost, but not quite, onto) this scene after the fact of the scene itself, and according to some rational program. The disconnect between the order of his arrangements and the excesses of his technique is what makes Homer worth liking. What makes this particular painting less than great, however, is that all of those well-placed objects, taken together, are fairly dispersed — separated, in fact, by the gulph of that empty wooden floor taking up almost a quarter of the whole composition — and so the painting lacks a focal point, a spot where all the individuated energy of each of its figures combines and concentrates. (If anything, it's that shock of bright desktop in the back right behind the triumvirate of girls. But that little spot isn't sufficient to marshal everything that goes on in this picture.) (TFS, 2025)