Financial Times: Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents – America's powerful painter of rage and fate

The Metropolitan Museum showcases the 19th-century artist in an exhibition of frank, profoundly affecting pictures

By Ariella Budick

April 20, 2022

This article appears in the Financial Times.

I neared the end of the Metropolitan Museum’s grave and vital Winslow Homer exhibition shaken by its accumulation of tragedy, struggle and catastrophe. And then I encountered a large painting that overwhelmed me with a climactic rush of dread. My heart accelerated, my eyes welled up and I tried to turn away from a scene that was both inconsequential and epic.

‘Fox Hunt’ (1893) by Winslow Homer © Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

A fox dashes across the snow, wheeling to outrun the flock of crows swooping overhead, huge and dark and close. The ground-hugging perspective, the high horizon, the wings outstretched like storm clouds at the top of the frame all made me want to crouch. Anxiety persisted even later, as I looked at the catalogue reproduction of “Fox Hunt” (1893), which lacks the power of scale or the weight of paint.

It’s not just the certainty that a beautiful creature is doomed, but also the knowledge that the fox, in a slightly different context, would be the one to wreak pitiless carnage. Homer’s beast resembles his pictures of sinewed men straining through tempests and disaster, powerful beings full of cruelty and rage who’ve been ripped from safety and have become brittle as twigs.

At the centre of the Met’s momentous gathering in New York (sensitively organised and smartly installed by Stephanie Herdrich, Sylvia Yount and Christopher Riopelle) is “Gulf Stream”, a mythic confrontation between forces of nature that Homer painted in 1899 and reworked in 1906. In the final version, a lone, bare-chested black fisherman sprawls in a small boat in the open sea. He stares stoically off into the hazy distance, averting his gaze from the viewer and from the sharks that circle his rudderless, mastless, oarless craft. The water all around him churns green, blue and white — and, in the foreground, runs ominously red.

"His two recurrent themes are the struggle against overwhelming force and the constant, unforgiving presence of death"

Homer’s depiction of the cresting shark, its maw agape in a sinister grin, recalls John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark” (1778), in which a nine-person crew rescues a nude, implausibly muscled merchant from the literal jaws of death. Turner’s “Slave Ship” (1840), with its arms and hands of drowning African captives reaching above the angry spume, provided another source of inspiration. But in its unsentimental portrait of loneliness and defeat, “Gulf Stream” feels more modern.

The intentions behind it remain opaque. The solitary sailor could represent all victims of racial persecution — or he might be a stand-in for the (white) painter, clinging to his craft but beset by adversity. Homer turned to the subject soon after his father died, and the work has been seen as a projection of vulnerability, a howl of abandonment.

Its bleakness led the painter to second-guess himself. After it first went on in display in 1900, viewers clamoured to know whether the protagonist survived. Homer responded by adding a ship on the horizon.

“You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who now is so dazed & parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily,” he wrote to his dealer. Homer was grumpy about the change, though; he would have preferred to let the turbid scene speak for itself and preserve its tinge of hopelessness. Nature is a force to which we all succumb.

Homer learnt early about inescapable fate. He was still in his twenties when Harper’s Weekly sent him to cover the American civil war. He spent a total of several months at the front, starting in 1861, capturing not only the battles between the abolitionist Union side and the pro-slavery Confederacy, but also the prosaic lives of soldiers at camp in a style free of falsifying martial rhetoric. The experience gave him his two recurrent themes: struggle against overwhelming force and the constant, unforgiving presence of death.

‘Sharpshooter’ (1863) © Courtesy of the Portland Museum of Art, Maine

The Met’s exhibition begins with “The Sharpshooter” (1863). A lone soldier perches high in a tree, a rifle’s butt obscuring his face, the barrel resting on a branch. The sniper, like the carnivorous birds in “Fox Hunt”, is engineered to administer death. Anonymous and impersonal, he offers intimations of a mortality that is sudden, unpredictable and impossible to guard against. Looking through a sniper-rifle’s telescopic sight, Homer once wrote, struck him as “being as near murder as anything I could ever think of in connection with the army”.

After the war, Homer recorded a changed nation. “The Veteran in a New Field”, painted in 1865 after the surrender of Confederate general Robert E Lee, encapsulates a persistent friction between allegory and reality, grief and hope. A soldier’s discarded Union jacket and canteen lie almost invisibly in the dirt, and the man turns away from the viewer to scythe the ripened wheat.

The scene evokes Isaiah’s prophecy about beating swords into ploughshares — but the title and the golden light draw attention to the field. America’s landscape, so recently ravaged, could once again turn bountiful and serene. Where armies were mown down by cannon fire, now stalks of grain fall to a tool of peace. And yet the faceless farmer is a Reaper too. Optimistic symbols and old wounds vie for primacy in a painting that can look simultaneously hopeful and grim. “All flesh is grass,” quoth the prophet: shortlived and self-renewing.

If war was Homer’s teacher, the sea was his muse, and it called out to him throughout his life. In 1883, he moved to a lonesome cottage overlooking the coast at Prouts Neck, Maine. There, he played out the private drama of a self-reliant man confronting the elements in an indifferent world, untethered by society’s conventions and expectations. In the brooding, sublime Prouts Neck pictures, green water beats against angular rock and foam rises in smoky white clouds. It’s worth seeing the exhibition just for the physical sense of urgency. Reproductions can’t capture the frenzied impasto, or the thick, buttery layers of pigment that build up into sensual allure.

The oils seduce with texture; the watercolours, which Homer believed would be his ticket to immortality, beguile with light. They deal with the same ponderous topics that weighed on him always, but with delicacy and technical bravado.

In “A Good Pool, Saguenay River” (1895), a salmon, big as a whale, leaps out of the water to catch a fly. Homer captures the fish at the apex of vitality and freedom, just before both are violently curtailed. An arcing filament leads from fly to rod, to a tiny man in a canoe.

The salmon’s magical burst of energy will sustain that faceless human for one more day, until it’s no longer enough. The fish is doomed — but the fisherman is too.

To July 31, metmuseum.org