New Yorker: Race, War, and Winslow Homer
The artist’s experiences in the Civil War and after helped him transcend stereotypes in portraying Black experience.
By Claudia Roth Pierpont
April 11, 2022
“Dressing for the Carnival” (1877). Its brightly colored, singing beauty is such that tragedy takes hold only on examination.Art work courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art
A soldier in blue sits high on the branch of a pine tree. The barrel of his rifle, jutting hard across the canopy of green, is mounted with a lens that he holds close to his eye as he takes aim. We can’t see his face. Neither can the man he is about to kill, down below, hundreds of yards away, whether in the midst of battle or furtively leaving camp to fill canteens—many soldiers got shot this way—or simply lifting his head above fortifications to take a breath. The telescopic rifle, widely introduced in this country during the Civil War, allowed for attack with unprecedented stealth, a technological leap akin in our time to the military drone. In the spring of 1862, Winslow Homer observed the sharpshooting soldiers trained to use these weapons while encamped with the Union Army at the Virginia front. Homer, at twenty-six, was a professional artist-reporter, his drawings often reproduced in the illustrated press. He aspired, however, to be a painter. “Sharpshooter,” by reliable account his first oil painting, completed in 1863, was preceded in the public eye by his engraving of the same hawkeyed soldier in Harper’s Weekly, part of the excitement over the élite new unit’s efficacy and skill. It would be easy to assume that he shared the excitement—his soldier has a mesmerizing energy and focus—were it not for a randomly surviving letter he wrote decades later, recalling that the use of these rifles had struck him “as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army.” He added a quick drawing of an unsuspecting victim framed in a rifle’s crosshairs.
“Sharpshooter” was painted back in the safety of Homer’s studio, in New York City. He’d moved from his native Boston in 1859, using the job at Harper’s as security while enrolling in life-drawing classes (one didn’t draw naked bodies in art class in Boston) and taking a few lessons in painting technique from a transplanted Frenchman. Mostly, though, his idea of painting grew out of his magazine illustrations, and while some of this work was brashly political—in 1860, he depicted Frederick Douglass, in mid-oration, being expelled from a stage by anti-abolitionists—the majority were cheery anecdotes of contemporary life. The first work he exhibited, also in 1860, was a watercolor titled “Skating in Central Park,” which suggests the lightly amiable direction he was taking before the war gave him a subject and a purpose.
He visited the soldiers’ camps around Washington in the fall of 1861 but was not overly affected. He would have travelled to Europe after that, to learn more about painting, if he’d had the money. The transformation came with his Virginia trip the following year. For two or more months he was “without food 3 days at a time & all in camp either died or were carried away with typhoid fever,” his mother wrote to his younger brother. “He came home so changed that his best friends did not know him.” The paper trail for Homer’s trips to the front ends here. A new biography, “Winslow Homer: American Passage,” by William R. Cross (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), confidently adds to the general disagreement about where and when (or even whether) he went back. The chaotic Battle of the Wilderness? The devastation at Spotsylvania Court House? The long and catastrophic—for both sides—siege of Petersburg? His presence at these historic killing fields has been deduced primarily from the paintings and drawings he now began to turn out with quiet intensity, creating our richest artistic record of the Civil War.
Coinciding with the biography, the Metropolitan Museum’s grand yet thematically intent new Homer show, titled “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents,” begins with a group of these paintings, and it’s stirring to see the young, relatively unschooled artist rise to eloquence in service of his broken country. The co-curator Sylvia Yount, setting out the show’s pointedly contemporary theme, writes, “A persistent fascination with struggle permeates Homer’s art, revealing lifelong concerns with race and the environment.” Homer can support these not so new claims easily, although the work is never rhetorical or preachy. A viewer coming to the exhibition from other American classics of the era in the Met’s galleries, like the famous mountain scenes by Bierstadt or Church, may initially feel puzzled by the emotional reserve, the understatement, even the smaller scale of these works. As a war painter, Homer was uncomfortable with battle scenes—he painted only one, a willfully unintelligible mayhem of men and trees—and at odds with the heroic posing of a European past. Several of his paintings simply give us weary, homesick men in camp, in the mud and the weather, enduring.
He even seemed to shy away from painting corpses, although their rarity in his work may have been partly strategic. Alexander Gardner’s photographs of fields strewn with the dead of Antietam, which drew huge crowds when exhibited in New York, in 1862, offered the lesson that the new art form, in its cold reality, could shock as paintings never could. Death, for Homer, is a single former Union soldier standing with his back to us, swinging a scythe against a field of wheat as tall and endless as the troops that fell at Antietam and the other battlefields. He executed the scene, titled “The Veteran in a New Field,” like a plainspoken realist—the high sunlight, the veteran’s rumpled shirt, the shadowed stalks of wheat—who couldn’t hide, try as he might, the dark and troubled heart of a poet. At some point, he changed his mind about what he wanted to portray. Painting out parts of a cradle scythe, the instrument used to harvest wheat at the time, he left his veteran wielding the anachronistically stark curve of a scythe that evoked images of the Grim Reaper. All flesh is grass. Yet Homer was never casual about his titles, and the veteran is also planting the earth anew. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares. Neither the painter nor we need choose a single meaning.
Two paintings are set where Homer could never have gone, behind enemy lines. (The imaginative prerogatives of painting over photography are also many.) “Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg,” of 1864, shows a Confederate soldier who can endure no longer. Leaping wildly atop fortifications meant as shelter, he stands exposed against the open sky, shouting tauntingly in the direction of massed Yankee forces. A couple of distant puffs of gun smoke suggest the ending to this act of suicidal insanity—or insane bravery, perhaps, for there is something heroic in this awful figure, so very different from the sharpshooter, whose unremitting eye was reported to drive troops to nervous collapse.
The problematic figure here is not the quixotic Rebel, though, toward whom Homer extends a strained compassion, but a Black banjo player huddled behind the fortifications, strumming away, his face a minstrel caricature of big pink lips and rolling eyes. (Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, in the show’s catalogue, notes that Homer would likely have used the same burnt cork and lampblack that minstrel players used to blacken their faces.) This figure presses the question: How far did Homer’s compassion extend in these years?
In the spontaneous act of drawing, his eye was perfectly honest, sketching Black men in the Union Army—a mule-team driver, men riding a baggage train—with individuality and dignity. Even in the more public sphere of magazine illustration, Black men—from Douglass to a figure seated on what looks to be a powder keg, illustrating “Dixie”—are few but untouched by minstrelsy. Questions have been raised about a lithograph called “Our Jolly Cook”: Is the frantically dancing Black man performing for his own racially clichéd pleasure or to meet the demands of an audience of grim-faced white soldiers? Homer brought Black soldiers to the fore in two substantive paintings, “The Bright Side” and “Army Boots,” which, while they don’t trade in physical stereotypes, show the men at rest, all but one lying down—or, as Shaw and others see it, purveying “tropes of Black indolence.” It seems fair to say that the painter who would end up “breaking artistic stereotypes about the Negro,” in the words of Alain Locke, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and a scholar of African American art, was still finding his way. His early depictions of Black men were variable. Whether owing to some personal acquaintance, however, or to the absence of fear, or to simple empathy, he never wavered in the dignity he accorded Black women.
It is doubtful whether Homer was ever near the Confederate prison known as Andersonville, in southwestern Georgia. But, within months of the war’s end, the artist, like everyone in the North who could read a newspaper, knew about the brutal conditions that ultimately resulted in the death there of thirteen thousand captured Union soldiers. The camp’s commander was put on very public trial, and was hanged. Homer made no attempt to show the prison itself. Yet his response was as large in intellectual scope and feeling as it is visually restrained and indirect. “Near Andersonville,” completed in 1866, shows a young Black woman, modestly but neatly dressed and wearing a white apron, standing in the doorway of a rough-hewn dwelling, looking to the side, deep in thought. Only at the edge of the painting do we see the soldiers she has seen already, captive Yankees being led off by Rebel forces, the triumphant Confederate flag flying overhead.
Without bloodshed, or brutality, Homer conveys the stakes of Union losses—the stakes of the war—in the face of one enslaved woman. She is depicted with neither the pitifulness nor the titillating nudity that made the female slave an attractive subject to many artists. (And to audiences. Hiram Powers’s“The Greek Slave,” a prettily chained white marble nude, was one of the most popular works of the nineteenth century. Even Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s sympathetic bust of a Black woman, titled “Why Born Enslaved!,” completed in 1873 and the centerpiece of another current Met show, is bound with ropes that frame one bared breast.) This woman is all consciousness. We are drawn in by the workings of her mind, her difficult but masked emotions—she couldn’t risk letting any reaction show—as, the Mona Lisa of the Civil War, she weighs her future and the future of her country.
“Ithink that it would probably kill me to have such a thing appear,” Homer wrote to an inquiring biographer, in 1908, two years before he died, at the age of seventy-four. “And as the most interesting part of my life is of no concern to the public I must decline to give you any particulars in regard to it.” Biographers are a fairly undiscourageable group, and the first biography of the artist was duly published in 1911. There was not a lot to work with, aside from the work itself. Homer’s two brothers volunteered some stories, but there was, otherwise, scant personal material. He was closely attached to his parents and to his older brother. He never married and had no known romantic relationships; the record offers little even about close friendships. There are no diaries, and hardly any letters of substance. (Homer’s moral condemnation of telescopic rifles is one of the few examples we have of serious thought put into words.) No protégés, no public life. Clement Greenberg, dismissing a later Homer biography, in 1944, blamed the fact that the book was “hard reading” on Homer, since he had “practically no life aside from his art” and “no inner life worth mentioning.” This was, of course, just what Homer would have wanted. Yet intrepid biographers have pressed on, drawn by the siren song of all he did instead of living.
Cross’s scrupulous new book is devoted to Homer as both man and artist and is largely a pleasure to read, despite the inevitable difficulties of the subject: call him repressed; call him, as Cross does, “a misfit by nature” or even a “human periscope,” who liked to observe others without being seen. Cross tries to circumvent these difficulties by placing the life in a wider context, particularly in Homer’s early years, when abolitionism was ablaze in Boston and in Cambridge, where the boy grew up, exposed to mounting outcries about the evils of slavery. Homer’s family was middle class but struggled to remain so, financially and socially. His father, Charles, a proud man, seems to have failed in every business venture he tried; his mother, Henrietta, a gifted watercolor artist, had a wealthy brother who helped them (however humiliatingly) get through. Devoutly Christian, the pair initially attended two different churches: hers was strongly pro-abolitionist, his strongly against, a position fundamentally aligned with the economic interests of Massachusetts. But with Winslow’s birth, in 1836, Henrietta joined her husband’s church, a move that seemed to go beyond awakened wifely duty. Winslow was named for their preacher, who invoked Scripture to claim that abolitionists would “fill the land with violence and blood.”
How the young man managed such personal and political discord is unknown. Cross, whose scruples sometimes lead to a Homer-like reticence, refuses even to ask questions. (Is this how Homer learned to keep his thoughts to himself? Or why in his adult life he stayed away from church?) By the time he was seventeen, he’d left high school and set to work in a Boston lithography shop. He may already have had hopes of painting, but hopes became certain plans six years later, when he arrived in New York. Here again, Cross seeks to provide a wider context, and while the material remains thin, one is grateful for every scrap that shows Homer living as a painter among painters, joining clubs and sharing thoughts in a downtown vie de bohème filled with excitement about selling paintings and (more often) worries about not selling them.
Settling in Greenwich Village for some twenty years, he rubbed shoulders with such close neighbors—often with studios in the same building—as Church and Bierstadt and, most important, the lesser known Eastman Johnson, who preceded Homer in treating African American subjects with sympathy. It is extraordinary to think of the human periscope having dinner with Johnson and John Frederick Kensett at the Waverly Inn, or regularly attending exhibitions. “What I remember best is the smell of paint,” he recalled of these years, which extended through the eighteen-seventies. “I used to love it in a picture gallery.”
Speculation about why he turned toward solitude—that is, inevitably, about his love life—has run the gamut. Was he homosexual and in hiding? The fact that there is “no evidence” (as Cross notes) of a relationship with a specific man means little, in the absence of evidence of any kind. In his work, the rendering of the male body lacks the overt eroticism of Eakins or Sargent (or, for that matter, of Michelangelo), but some critics (particularly Thomas Hess) have perceived it there, and, in any case, almost nothing about Homer is overt. A photograph of him and a friend, Albert Kelsey, both rather dandified and evidently close, is hardly evidence, but a nude drawing of Kelsey, however comic in added details, goes some way toward justifying speculation. Yet Homer’s conflicts show signs of being even more complex.
Physically, he was slight and wiry, elegant in dress and bearing but prematurely balding, and with a large mustache he seemed to hide behind. Although he earned critical acclaim as early as the mid-sixties, sales remained slow; it was only in 1875 that he was able to quit illustration work, and far longer before he began to achieve financial stability. He was well aware during all these years that he could not support a wife and family. Romantic failure was another possible reason for secrecy, and the pretty women who fill his postwar canvases have prompted various scholars to guess at which one may have broken his heart. The best candidate is a beautiful young artist, Helena de Kay, whose marriage seems to have disturbed him. Homer’s cold and mournful portrait of her, dressed in black, was precisely dated “June 3rd 1874,” her wedding day, and intended as a less than joyous gift. Still, the majority of women in these paintings are anonymous figures, purely social, as illustrative of a determinedly sunlit America as his other postwar subjects: the energetic boys of “Snap the Whip,” the one-room schoolhouse of “The Country School,” the broad green pastures of “Milking Time” and of a country at peace.
These are still among Homer’s most beloved works. The genial populism of such subjects, however, was regarded with notable loathing by Henry James, then a working critic. In 1875, he complained about the artist’s “freckled, straight-haired Yankee urchins, his flat-breasted maidens, suggestive of a dish of rural doughnuts and pie, his calico sun-bonnets, his flannel shirts”—all the proud provincialism (with a bit of sexual repugnance thrown in) that James would flee for Europe, and which he felt Homer was wasting his enormous talent on. Homer himself had spent seven or eight months in Paris, in 1867. But, aside from an affinity for Millet’s glowing scenes of noble peasants in the fields, French art left little mark, and seems rather to have shown him how essentially American he was. He displayed no interest in going back. He was restless, though, and may have been dissatisfied. He had begun to paint in watercolor for the first time since his youth; he made increasing use of photographs; he travelled from one picturesque locale to another, as though in search of a purpose like that he had felt during the war. No one has suggested a better reason for his heading back South just as the situation there was once again becoming dire.
“Near Andersonville,” completed in 1866, refers to a notorious Confederate prison in southwestern Georgia. As Union prisoners of war are led off in the background, the contemplative face of this lone enslaved woman conveys the stakes of the war.Art work courtesy the Newark Museum of Art, N.J.; Photograph by Richard Goodbody
In 1877, with the new politics of President Rutherford B. Hayes, remaining Federal troops in the South were relieved of the task of enforcing racial justice. Reconstruction was at an end, and the widespread result, through a combination of disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and violence, was a return to a system hardly different from slavery. Homer was in Virginia that spring, and was likely also there the previous year, despite being reproved and even threatened by local whites for showing undue interest in Black life. The work he did affirms that they had cause for concern. “A Visit from the Old Mistress,” of 1876, offers a confrontation between the white woman who has entered stiffly into former slave quarters and three Black women who regard her steadily, without greeting; the air is thick with distrust, the gap between them fraught with unresolved history. Painted the same year, “The Cotton Pickers” displays two formerly enslaved young women, akin to Millet’s peasants, looming like goddesses against a clouded sky yet wholly trapped—as they must know—in a field of cotton overspilling and blindingly infinite. Like the wheat of “Veteran in a New Field,” the cotton suggests more than itself, but shares only the sorrow of that Northern crop and none of its hope.
The celebratory preparations of “Dressing for the Carnival,” of 1877, have such a brightly colored, singing beauty that tragedy takes hold only on examination. A group of figures, all African American, are gathered in a sunny yard. Two women are stitching a young man into a brilliant Harlequin costume, while a scattered group of barefoot children, some holding tiny American flags, look on. The man’s fantastic costume has been linked with Jonkonnu, a Jamaican holiday with African roots that had long since spread to parts of the South. Granting slaves a brief moment of relative freedom, it was held around Christmas for decades. But, with the bold promises of Reconstruction, elements of Jonkonnu were joined to the national festivities that seemed at last to belong to everyone: Homer’s original title was “Sketch—4th of July in Virginia.”
The dominating figure, once again, is a woman: this time, a tall, rawboned, intensely determined older woman with a pipe in her mouth—tobacco was the main crop in Virginia—who, taking a stitch, draws a thread through the air with the powerful gesture of a Fate. This woman has been through everything and can carry any load. Yet, as Homer and much of his audience knew, she is as trapped as the dreamy young women in the cotton fields, unable to make a life for herself or for these shoeless, happily excited children with their heartbreaking flags.
Cross’s portrayal of Homer, as contemporary as the Met’s, emphasizes his “empathy with Blacks and Native Americans.” The latter part of the statement is not untrue, although Homer’s contact with Native Americans was limited: a Montaukett chief on Long Island whom he met (and painted) in 1874—Cross relates that Homer’s wealthy uncle swindled the tribe out of land—and Indigenous guides hired to lead a fishing trip he took with his older brother in Quebec, people whose work in making canoes he documented and admired. These paintings have never been well known, and Cross’s contribution here is particularly fresh. Homer’s depictions of African Americans, on the other hand, were regarded as exceptional as early as 1880, although this aspect of his work faded from view along with the accepted rights and humanity of his subjects.
Paintings disappeared, too. “Near Andersonville,” originally owned by a New Jersey woman who’d gone South to teach in freedmen’s schools, was forgotten for nearly a century, and emerged from the woman’s family attic only in the early nineteen-sixties. Recognized as a (signed) Homer, but with nothing else about it known, it was given the title “Captured Liberators” by an astute dealer in Civil War artifacts. By this time, however, the country’s leading Homer scholar did not believe that Homer would have given a painting even such a mildly political title, and soon renamed it “At the Cabin Door.” It was a pair of scholars with eyes and minds sharpened by the civil-rights movement, Peter H. Wood and Marc Simpson, who recovered the painting’s story and true title and, along with the art historian Karen C. C. Dalton, set out to reëstablish the importance of Homer’s African American subjects, and to explain the artist’s relevance to our times. And so today Cross comfortably compares “The Cotton Pickers” to portraits by Kehinde Wiley and the Met’s show includes, as part of a “contemporary coda,” several terrific Kerry James Marshall sketches riffing on one of Homer’s late sea paintings: a relaxed and high-living modern Black family out sailing, boom box and all. No victims here.
“The Veteran in a New Field” (1865). Homer initially painted a cradle scythe—the implement actually used by soldiers who returned to their fields after the war—but then painted parts of it out and left his veteran wielding the anachronistically stark curve of a scythe that evoked images of the Grim Reaper.Art work courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Women and tempests. The dangers of the sea and the beauty of the sturdy fisherwomen on the northern coast of England, near Tynemouth, in the village of Cullercoats, where Homer, still restless, travelled in 1881, following in the path of many other painters, and remained for close to a year and a half. Tempests and angry seas and women, over and over. And then, in 1884, back in the States, he combined them anew in “The Life Line,” depicting a woman being saved from shipwreck by a man, the pair suspended by a pulley just above a crashing sea. This throbbing tumult of a painting was a great success on exhibition, its suggestiveness—the Times noted that the woman was “a buxom lassie”—largely subordinated to its heroics. There has been much discussion of just where Homer saw this new mode of rescue, which he painted with exacting care. Cross notes, too, the work’s “dramatic truth.” But the frenzied scene also looks very much like a sexual fantasy run amok, a Victorian ravishment, with the man’s face hidden by the woman’s billowing red scarf, and her water-soaked clothes outlining every curve and crevice, as she swoons, unconscious, in his arms. Only his inability to see her so exposed, and her unawareness of her exposure, insured the painting’s (and the viewer’s) hold on propriety.
Expanding on the subject two years later, this most reserved and subtle painter achieved a sort of aggrandized light pornography in “Undertow,” in which two sculpturally chiselled men drag two provocatively drenched and entwined women from the angry surf. (Legend has it that Homer posed his young models on the roof of his New York studio building, periodically dousing them with water.) Highly praised at the time for its “virility” and described as “an altogether manly work,” this painting, following on “The Life Line,” seems rather to betray the artist in crisis on these very matters.
Could this crisis account for the fact that Homer’s work came virtually to a halt in the next few years? He never went further than a drawing for a wildly sensual work called “Ship Deck with Two Women Lashed to the Mast,” which would have required great pailfuls to be brought up to the roof. When he resumed painting, the sensuality was becalmed, as in the two women raptly dancing together, before a moonlit sea, in the elegiac work “A Summer Night,” of 1890. But soon even such figures came to seem superfluous. People on the shore or on surrounding rocks appeared less frequently, were painted out, were unnecessary. The sea alone became his most insistent subject, the place where his desires were drowned.
Homer was able to replicate the inspiring coastal geography of Northern England at his family’s newly fashioned homestead in Maine, on a rocky promontory called Prouts Neck, where he spent much of the rest of his life. But not all of it, despite his preferred image as a hermit. (His door knocker was a Medusa head, and he put out a sign that read “snakes! snakes! mice!” to keep people away.) Although he never returned to Europe, there were trips to New York, even after he gave up his studio there, and many trips to Boston—especially, music lover that he was, to hear concerts. Prouts Neck was on its way to becoming a summer resort; Homer’s studio, with a balcony overlooking the sea, was in hailing distance of an elegant hotel, whose kitchen would deliver his lunch.
Nevertheless, winters were isolating and bitter. After Homer’s mother died, in April, 1884, he assumed the care of his obstreperous father, and that December, whether to flee the cold or the sorrow, the two men vacationed together in Nassau, in the Bahamas; Homer, alone, went on to Cuba for a few more weeks. There were later winter trips to Florida and to Bermuda. But the Bahamas, he wrote, was special: “the best place I have ever found.” Although he returned only once, after his father’s death, in 1898, the work he did as a result of these two trips—one major oil painting and an outpouring of watercolors—seems ever more important, and it forms the resplendent yet strangely vexed core of the Met’s show.
“The Gulf Stream,” begun in 1899, is the linchpin of the Met’s show.Art work courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Turquoise waters, bright sun, brown skin—rendered in a watercolor technique newly free and vibrant, using the white of the paper to set off colors already saturated with light, so that the images appear to glow from within. The Met’s selection of these fragile and rarely shown works suggests not only summery breezes but also the human warmth and interest so increasingly absent from the ocean scenes back home. Yet, to judge by the catalogue that forms the permanent record of this show, the beauty of these works is a significant problem. Although slavery ended in the Bahamas in the eighteen-thirties, in Homer’s era it was a British colony with a racially brutal economic system, akin to sharecropping in America. Tourism, a means of income for the British governor, was just gearing up, and Homer, who published some of these scenes as illustrations in a “touristic article,” in 1887, is in the dock.
“He seemed entirely comfortable with colonialist stereotypes of Caribbean islands as exotic idylls,” the historian Daniel Immerwahr writes. True, he admits, Homer depicts hurricanes hitting the islands, and the works have “variation and nuance,” but the weather he shows is too often bright, the people too consistently healthy. We see Black men wresting a living from the beautiful waters, but not “the harsh economics of colonialism” that impels them. Nor do we see any “indictment” of “U.S. colonialism,” which did not in fact exist in the places Homer knew: the Bahamas remained British until independence, Bermuda is still a British territory, and the U.S. takeover of Cuba followed his visit by some thirteen years. Beyond the Atlantic, the artist is censured for failing to depict the murderous violence of the U.S. war of conquest in the Philippines—about which Immerwahr has written elsewhere with effectiveness—and a reader might easily fail to realize that Homer was never in the Philippines. No matter. An illustration of the violence appeared on the cover of Life. The artist could have—should have—painted such a scene. Instead, he spent the years when the war was taking place (1899-1902) making works so enticing they amounted to “an invitation to empire.”
A debt is owed to the co-curator Stephanie L. Herdrich for conceiving this show. So it is even more perplexing, in terms of the triumph of presupposition, when she writes, of the Bahamas watercolors, “He focused on the quotidian lives of the island’s Black inhabitants and uncritically acknowledged the rigid stratification of Bahamian society.” Uncritically? The statement would be perfectly accurate were it not for this inexplicable word, which contradicts the content of several of the works on the museum’s walls, and even some of Herdrich’s descriptions of them. “A Garden in Nassau,” for example, of 1885, in which a small Black child stands on a dusty road, looking up toward a tall, closed gate in a whitewashed wall, forcefully excluded from the lush growth of palms and flowers on the other side. (We know that Homer originally painted and then erased two figures climbing the wall to pick a coconut, increasing the poignance of the lone child.) Or “Native Hut at Nassau,” of the same year, with a group of Black children staring from the doorway of a poor hut in a hardscrabble yard; Cross, whose perception of the artist’s intent is more generous, sees him as “eager to understand the lives they lived within these houses.” Or “A Wall, Nassau,” of 1898, showing the same sort of whitewashed wall with cultivated plantings behind it, and jagged shards of glass along the top to keep the unwanted out. Needless to say—or is it?—these images are not exotic idylls and are far from uncritical of the racial status quo.
Then, there are the sharks. Even the healthiest islanders, in “Shark Fishing,” of 1885, take mortal risks in a rowboat hardly larger than their prey. The results for some can be seen in the same year’s “Sharks (The Derelict),” in which another small if sturdier boat, now swamped by sharks, is eerily empty and going over on its side. Homer placed this image at the climax of his first show of Caribbean works, in 1885; it was found so unnerving that it didn’t sell for twenty years. The culmination of this output, “The Gulf Stream,” long contemplated and begun only in 1899—the single oil based on his time in the Bahamas—also failed to sell for several years. Homer said that he knew it was not made to hang in anybody’s home.
The linchpin of the Met’s show, “The Gulf Stream” intensifies the artist’s racial focus even as it universalizes its sailor’s plight. A single Black man, the drama’s protagonist, is shown bare-chested and casually majestic—“modelled with a musculature and physical power,” Alain Locke wrote in 1936, that “broke the cotton-patch and back-porch tradition” and “began the artistic emancipation of the Negro subject.” But his innate power is to no avail. He lies across the deck of a devastated boat, as gape-mouthed sharks close in; the water nearby is flecked with blood. A few stalks of sugarcane coil across the deck, either a plain fact of his cargo or a sign of centuries of slave trade. “I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description,” Homer replied with typical asperity to questions about its meaning. He also mentioned, though, the influence of Turner’s painting “Slave Ship” (originally titled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On”), which Ruskin had once owned but said he found too painful to keep.
With the unsold painting returned to his studio, Homer made changes. The boat—and presumably the man adrift in it—became American; we can make out “Key West” lettered on the stern. He added a broken section to the hull, and a grand but ghostly ship, gray and nearly transparent, on the horizon. Some speculate that this ship was meant to supply the hope that people wanted to see, but that is not how Homer worked—and rarely how artists work, especially in old age. It hurts more to know that Cordelia was almost saved, and that the ship, pace Auden, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
It is no surprise that Homer painted no self-portraits. There are, however, some imaginative hints in two of his most magisterial late works. “Fox Hunt,” of 1893, is the biggest painting he ever made: six feet across, it is given over to a single alert yet weary fox, pursued by a flock of terrifying crows—a deathly winged mass—across an expanse of glaring snow. It is winter in Maine; the sea is visible in the mid-distance, cutting off the fox’s path. The struggling animal, legs sinking perilously in the snow, looks off toward the impassable waters. Homer signed the painting in a curious way, giving the letters a rounded weight, so that his name, too, sinks like an object or a creature in the snow, to the very bar of the capital “H.” In his late fifties, he still possessed something of the fox’s elegance, as well as the ironic wit for the comparison, and as much wonder at this empty white world as despair.
The hunched figure in “Driftwood,” painted when the artist was seventy-three, in 1909, also looks out to sea, in foul weather. He is unusual simply in that he exists, a man on Homer’s by now long unpeopled shore. He is tying a rope around a fallen, washed-up tree trunk—“driftwood,” too, seems ironic—that is far too massive for him to move; he might better use it to anchor himself against the elements. He does not appear young. There is a real chance of his being blown off his feet, inundated, badly hurt. Homer was excited about this painting, which he took up after suffering a mild stroke. It was the last work he completed before his death, the following year. “I have little time for anything,” he warned his younger brother, excusing himself from Thanksgiving dinner. “I am painting.”
“Driftwood” has the quality of a devotional image. The figure, as inconspicuous against the waves as the fox is arresting against the snow, is difficult even to see, at first. Before him, the sea is painted with an acute discernment (deep gray against the nearby rocks, wild sprays of textured white, glassy opal and limpid gray beyond) that was learned by looking hard, for years, with a depth of commitment most people reserve for each other. He braved it, holding fast, to show others so much they didn’t see—beauty, injustice, sheer mystery—his gaze ever outward and his face turned away.