Minister of Peace

“My constitutional nature has presented formidable obstacles to the attainment of that truly desirable character, a consistent and exemplary member of the Religious Society of Friends,” wrote Edward Hicks in his posthumously published Memoirs, “ one of which is an excessive fondness for painting, a trade to which I was brought up, being connected with coach making, and followed the greatest part of my life.” Born April 4, 1780 and reborn around 1800 as a Quaker minister, Hicks continually fought his “fondness for painting,” which he saw as worldly and sinful, “a link in the chain of anti-Christian foibles next to music and dancing.” Hicks found resolution in creating religious images promoting the pacifism of the Society of Friends, most famously the sixty or so works known as The Peaceable Kingdom. The example above (from 1833-1834) not only depicts the words of Chapter 11 of the Book of Isaiah, where the lion lays down with the lamb and a little child leads them, but also shows the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, forming a peace treaty with the local Lenape tribe. In 1999, I saw nearly half of the Peaceable Kingdom paintings all together at an exhibition at the PMA. The sheer repetition of the imagery wore me down a bit, but I wish now that I’d have gone back to look more closely at this unique figure in American art.

Because he painted the words of Isaiah so many times, it’s hard to imagine him painting anything else. Of course, Hicks grew up painting carriages and store signs first as an apprentice and later as the owner of his own business. “I should be a burthen on my family or friends were it not for my knowledge of painting,” Hicks wrote, acknowledging that all his service to the Society of Friends brought him no income. I’m fascinated by Hicks’ Washington at the Delaware (above, from 1849) in how it portrays Hicks’ perception of the heroic George Washington, whose mythology bloomed beyond reason immediately after his death and continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century. Living in the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania, Hicks undoubtedly knew people who had seen Washington in action and perhaps even fought at his side. Characteristically, Hicks shows Washington during a moment of peace, being too much of a pacifist to show the Father of His Country in battle. Hicks’ painting of Washington’s horse is wonderful. After riding horseback for thousands of miles, preaching the Quaker way as far as Canada, Hicks clearly knew every inch of what a horse looked like.

Hicks’ memoirs frustrate for the most part those looking for some glimpse into his painting style. Most of the memoirs deal with his faith, sprinkling disparaging remarks about painting here and there. I’d love to know what was going through Hicks’ mind when he put those human-like features on the animals in some of his Peaceable Kingdom paintings or where he saw some of the more exotic animals gathered in his Noah’s Ark (above, from 1846). Hicks, however, does end his memoirs by evoking the words of Isaiah: “Finally, my friends, farewell! May the melancholy be encouraged and the sanguine quieted; may the phlegmatic be tendered and the choleric humbled; may self be denied and the cross of Christ worn as a daily garment; may his peaceable kingdom for ever be established in the rational, immortal soul; then will be fulfilled the prophetic declaration of the infinitely wise Jehovah, through his evangelical prophet—“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them… Nothing shall hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” How amusing it would be to Hicks that his most lasting legacy of his pacifist faith would be the paintings he saw as a sinful diversion from God’s work.

Dark Allegories

"Under the dark veil of the night, in a wild and remote place, the greedy criminal murders his victim, snatches his gold and looks to make sure there is no sign of life to betray his fearful deed. He does not see that Nemesis, that terrible aid to justice, is pursuing him, and is about to seize him and deliver him up to its unyielding assistant," wrote Pierre-Paul Prud’hon of his painting Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime (above, from 1808). Born April 4, 1758, Prud’hon painted in the nineteenth century like a Renaissance master time-traveling to the age of Romanticism. Prud’hon painted chiaroscuro as dramatically as Caravaggio in both religious and secular scenes. He painted Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime for the Palace of Justice in Paris—an unforgettable visual statement that crime doesn’t pay.


Like his contemporary David, Prud’hon fell under the spell of neo-classicism, especially when depicting the nude figure as in Nude Viewed from Behind (above, from the 1810s). While other artists of his time created such drawings as preliminary work for paintings, Prud’hon employed such draftsmanship for its own sake. You can see hints of da Vinci-esque sfumato in the gentle shading of the figure, who seems more like three-dimensional sculpture than two-dimensional drawing. Although critics often praise Prud’hon for his realism, the figure shown here is clearly part of the tradition of the idealized human form.


When Prud’hon’s mistress and student, Constance Mayer, took her life in 1821, he fell into a deep depression. Prud’hon’s wife and the mother of his children had gone insane years before, so Constance had kept him and his family together. Prud’hon died just two short years later. Before his death, Prud’hon painted his greatest masterpiece, his Crucifixion (above, from 1822). The coiled tension of Christ’s body exemplifies Prud’hon’s mastery of the human body. By turning Christ’s face away from the viewer, Prud’hon shows psychological depth, choosing to leave that moment of anguish suggestively hidden rather than clearly depicted. Knowing the depths of his own anguish, Prud’hon couldn’t bring himself to give Christ’s pain a face, literally. Unfortunately, Prud’hon achieved the midnight blacks of many of his works through the use of bitumen, which has made his paintings decay badly despite the best efforts of conservators. While some artists seem to fade away, Prud’hon literally retreats into the darkness of his own works.

Lost in the Woods

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), The Forest of Fontainebleau, 1846; oil on canvas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Dennis Warren

Thanks to its unique combination of sand plains, limestone plateaus, and tree-filled forests, the region known as the Forest of Fontainebleau offers a tableau of natural beauty rarely seen. Add to that beauty a long, rich history dating back to the days of the Druids, it becomes easy to understand how these formal royal hunting grounds seized as national property during the French Revolution take on a unique place in the French national psyche. In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet, an exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, tries to convey some of the depth and breadth of that hold the forest, once known as the “desert of the Gauls,” has on the soul of the French. From the time that Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot began painting in the forest in the 1820s (his The Forest of Fontainebleau, from 1846, appears above) up through the advent of the Claude Monet and the Impressionists in the 1880s, many thousands of paintings were made there, an astounding 1,800 of which were exhibited at the Paris Salon. When photography became a viable artistic medium, some of the earliest experiments in landscape photography took place in that natural wonderland. In this exhibition and accompanying catalogue, we see the origins of the love of nature more commonly associated with Impressionism today, the heavy-handed commercialization of the pristine beauty, and the conservationism that ultimately saved the forest of Fountainebleau—all through the eyes of the artists who loved it most.

Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), Solitude, 1853; oil on canvas; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the W.P. Wilstach Fund, 1906
In the early nineteenth century, Italy stood as the place where the aspiring open air landscape artist needed to learn his trade. Corot himself actually spent three years in Italy in the 1820s before returning to his native France and Fontainebleau. Although tastemakers such as Stendhal and John Ruskin disliked the unusual beauty of Fontainebleau (Ruskin called its “hideous rocks… never hideous enough to please me”), other authors such as George Sand and Gustave Flaubert seized upon the region’s appeal and promoted it to the intelligentsia. Within a short time, many artists follow Corot’s example and a small artists’ colony forms in the nearby town of Barbizon, which gave the Barbizon school its name. “For the group of artists who colonized Barbizon,” Kimberly Jones writes in her catalogue essay, “Landscapes, Legends, Souvenirs, Fantasies: The Forest of Fontainebleau in the Nineteenth Century,” “Fontainebleau was more than an open-air studio; it was a laboratory in which they examined the subtle shifts in time of day, season, and atmospheric change with an almost scientific rigor.” Jean-François Millet’s Solitude (above, from 1853) shows the forest in winter in a style that presages the Impressionists by decades. Fontainebleau offered a veritable cornucopia of landscapes and effects upon those scenes for the artist. This exhibition provides ample examples of this endless source of material mined by ambitious artists for decades.

Claude Monet (1840-1926), The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest, 1865; oil on canvas; Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Sam Salz and Bequest of Julia W. Emmons, by exchange (64.210)

As word spread of Fontainebleau’s beauty, tourists began to flood the region in the footsteps of the artists. Contemporary cartoonists lampooned the distress of landscapists interrupted by people wandering into their pictures. In 1849, train service linking Paris and the forest put the natural setting a mere hour’s travel away, exploding the number of day trippers (while also making the forest more accessible to city-bound artists, too). Claude-Francois Denecourt, a local entrepreneur, saw an opportunity to unite his love of the area with his love of profit and began promoting the forest of Fontainebleau “experience” in a way that we would now call almost Disney-esque. “Denecourt peddled his own unique vision of the Forest of Fontainebleau,” Jones writes, “one in which every rock, tree, and clearing was a place of wonder, in which history and fantasy, nature and art merged into an extraordinary, if fictitious whole.” Denecourt slapped famous names from Charlemagne to Napoleon onto features of the landscape, many of which were later painted time and again. Artists such as Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Delacroix found their names bestowed upon landmarks. Monet’s The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest (above, from 1865) commemorates one of the many trees Denecourt dubbed with fame. Denecourt eventually designed pathways through the forest to help direct visitors. “He molded and shaped the visitor’s experience,” Jones laments. “The small blue arrows he placed throughout the forest to guide visitors were like bold brushstrokes against an otherwise virgin canvas.” By the 1870s, refreshment stands and souvenir shops plunged the final arrow into the heart of the artists who witnessed the commercialization of their inspirational source and spiritual sanctuary. The parallels between Denecourt’s work and modern despoiling in the name of commerce are too blatant for Jones to even mention.

Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), The Cave, 1828-1830; oil on paper mounted on canvas; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Frank Heller and the European Painting Acquisition Fund

Over time, Denecourt grew even more daring in developing his fictions, going so far as to create caves and caverns and devising elaborate “histories” for them to entice the curious. Théodore Rousseau, who painted The Cave (above, from 1828-1830), one of the natural rock formations, finally had enough of Denecourt’s fairytales and others who were ruining the forest with logging and the introduction of non-indigenous types of trees. Rousseau petitioned the government in 1861 and won, successfully protecting a large section of the forest from development, thus creating the first nature preserve in history. Rousseau “was the artist who most consistently represented the forest at the Salon,” according to Simon Kelly in his essay, “The Mystery of the Forest: Paintings of Fontainebleau at the Salon,” eventually earning the nickname “The Ruisdael of the Forest of Fontainebleau.” Kelly outlines the growth of landscape painting, especially depictions of Fontainebleau, at the Salon, with thirty percent of the works exhibited in 1860 being landscapes and a peak of seventy-seven landscapes in 1880. Rousseau and others worked to preserve the Fontainebleau they knew through these exhibited works as much as by their political action. Sadly, by the time that later artists such as Cezanne, Seurat, and even Picasso came to Fontainebleau, the damage had been done and the Fontainebleau of the Barbizon School existed only in paint and memory.

Eugène Cuvelier (1837-1900), Carrefour de l'Epine, early 1860s; salted paper print from paper negative; National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 1995

Sarah Kennel’s essay, “An Infinite Museum: Photography in the Forest of Fontainebleau,” helps bridge the perceived gap between landscape painting and landscape photography in the nineteenth century. Advances in photographic technology as much as the introduction of train access to Fontainebleau made it easier for early photographers to bring their gear into the open air. Gustave Le Gray, a painter turned photographer, brought his painterly sensibilities to the new medium. Eugène Cuvelier, who lived in Barbizon and knew both Rousseau and Millet, photographed the forest year round and in all types of weather conditions, taking the atmospheric “experiments” of the painters to another level. Cuvelier’s Carrefour de l'Epine (above, from the early 1860s) shows his use of the salted paper print, which, as Kennel explains, “offer[ed] a rich and subtle tonal range that both captures detail and suggests broad harmonies of light and dark,” making it perfect for landscape photography. In Cuvelier’s unpopulated photographs of Fontainebleau, we see the first true attempts at landscape photography as the technology of the medium itself began to catch up to the desires of it’s proponents.

Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), Two Men Turning over the Soil, 1866; pastel and black conté crayon on cream wove paper; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Quincy Adams Shaw through Quincy Adams Shaw, Jr., and Mrs. Marian Shaw Haughton

Cuvelier rarely photographed the people of the Fontainebleau region, but other photographers did. The catalogue and exhibit allow the viewer to put these photographs of these simple people next to the romanticized depictions of their life done by Millet in works such as Two Men Turning over the Soil (above, from 1866). After so many images of the landscape itself, it’s easy to forget the people who lived near the forest long before artists “discovered” it. The story of the Forest of Fontainebleau is really the story of the people who came to it and both took from it and gave to it, to varying degrees. For every Denecourt that robbed from it, there was a Rousseau to fill it up again. I remember seeing the Renoir Landscapes exhibition at the PMA last year (my review here) and coming away amazed at what an influence Fontainebleau and the Barbizon School had on Renoir, who came there with the second generation of the Impressionists as Fontainebleau itself began to fade away. After reading In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet, it’s hard to imagine Renoir reacting any other way.


[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for providing me with a review copy of In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet and for the images above from the exhibition.]

This Little Light of Mine

When William Holman Hunt founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, he probably saw it as a union of equals. Born April 2, 1827, Hunt couldn’t have guessed that the poet-painter Rossetti and the more talented and versatile Millais would eventually overshadow him, almost to the point of erasing him from the history of the Pre-Raphaelites founding. During the Victorian Era, however, Hunt found his proper audience in almost cloyingly religious works such as The Light of the World (above, from 1854). The Light of the World toured extensively during Hunt’s lifetime thanks to the piety of the age. From my perspective, it appears too Thomas Kinkaid-ish in its obvious tugging on the heartstrings. Perhaps our Kinkaid-friendly times will rediscover this side of Hunt, but I think he has much more to offer.

In The Shadow of Death (above, from 1871), Hunt employs the almost photographic realism of Millais along with a symbolism that seems downright Medieval—the main goal of the brotherhood as it tried to turn back the clock to before the Renaissance and Raphael. Hunt paints the adult Jesus stretching in the carpentry shop of his father Joseph, casting a shadow on the wall that prefigures the crucifixion. A woman kneeling near Jesus’ feet sees the shadow on the wall and recoils in horror, seeing her son’s fate literally written on the wall. Where The Light of the World bashes you with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, The Shadow of Death strikes a message with nuance, forcing you to tease out the meaning of the picture and mentally enter into it.

Hunt took his mania for exact detail to the point that he traveled to the Holy Land just to research such works as The Shadow of Death and The Scapegoat (above, from 1856). The Scapegoat is as simple a religious image as you can find without depicting a human face, but the handling of the landscape, especially the majestically purple mountains in the distance, makes this more than just a devotional exercise. Like any good Pre-Raphaelite, Hunt led a colorful life, particularly when he tried to marry his widow’s sister, which was then illegal in England, and left the country to do so. That intrigue doesn’t stand up to the soap operas of Rossetti’s and Millais’ lives, but it does show that Hunt was not a simple follower of social mores. Hunt wrote a memoir near the end of his life giving his side of the story of the origin of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, hoping to rewrite the histories that gave him lesser credit than Rossetti and Millais. In many ways, the success of Hunt most obvious religious works made him a convenient scapegoat for critics hoping to steer public tastes away from such blatant emotional appeals. Sadly, they never looked beyond those showstoppers to see Hunt’s nuanced works lurking in the shadows.

Born Again

When Max Ernst joined the German army to serve in World War I he felt like his life had ended, writing later that "Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914." Born April 2, 1891, Ernst’s rebirth as an artist took place in the wake of the Great War as the madness of a generation’s self-destruction called for the Dadaism and Surrealism that flourished where reason failed. In Pietà or Revolution by Night (above, from 1923), Ernst addresses his father issues by mimicking the familiar image of the pieta, replacing the Virgin Mary with his cold, distant father and Christ with himself as cold, hard marble. A figure resembling Sigmund Freud lurks in the background just to clear up any doubts that a psychodrama’s playing out here.


Ernst learned from every artist he encountered in his travels, from Paul Klee to Giorgio de Chirico. The Elephant Celebes (above, from 1921) pays homage to de Chirico in creating a monstrous machine-elephant set to rumble down the ominous streets of an unpopulated de Chirico town. The Elephant Celebes also confounds nature and technology in a way that anyone intimately familiar with the mechanized murder of World War I would still have nightmares about. Ernst’s Elephant could easily share a surrealist zoo habitat with the bizarre creations of Salvador Dali.

When fascism began to spread across Europe in the run-up to World War II, Ernst responded with Une Semaine de Bonté (one image from which appears above, from 1934), a series of collages made from cutting apart Victorian Era magazines and books and building bizarre images set in deceivingly tranquil, homey situations. Joseph Cornell saw these images and borrowed the technique and the spirit of Ernst for many of his own “boxes.” Ernst himself never found a truly stable home. He left his lover, the artist Leonora Carrington, behind when he fled France after the German occupation of World War II. Once in America, he wed art patron Peggy Guggenheim, only to divorce her and marry fellow surrealist Dorothea Tanning in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner—perhaps the only double wedding in art history. Ernst’s work puzzles me, but in a good way. The instability of his life and his artistic vision match the instability of the world crumbling around him. In his second life, the surreal had truly become the real.

Child’s Play

For March, to celebrate Women’s History Month in the United States, I decided to ask, “Which of the following Women artists is your favorite?” In the most popular Art Poll by Bob yet, with a total of 114 votes, Georgia O'Keeffe won with 22 votes, barely edging out Frida Kahlo, who scored 20 supporters. Käthe Kollwitz surged at the end to garner 18 votes, beating out early leader Artemisia Gentileschi, who ended with 15, for third place. Mary Cassatt got 14 votes, Cecilia Beaux got 8, Helen Frankenthaler got 6, Louise Nevelson got 5, Paula Modersohn-Becker got 4, and Judy Chicago got 2. Many thanks to everyone that voted and especially to everyone who sent to me the names of other women artists that could have been on the list. As with everything else on this blog, it’s a learning experience for me and I hope everyone else out there.

For April, to commemorate Alex’s birthday at the end of the month, I’ve decided to ask, “Who is your favorite painter of children?”:

Mary Cassatt (e.g., The Child's Bath, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair)

Thomas Gainsborough (e.g., The Blue Boy)

Winslow Homer (e.g., Snap the Whip, Boys in a Pasture)

Thomas Lawrence (e.g., Sarah Barrett Moulton: "Pinkie")

Antonio Mancini (e.g., examples from my review here)

John Singer Sargent (e.g., Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose [above, from 1885-86], The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit)

Diego Velázquez (e.g., Las Meninas)

I’ll confess to a love of Sargent’s depictions of children, which actually led to a special exhibition just of those paintings at the Brooklyn Museum in 2004 called Great Expectations. I left Thomas Eakins off the list because he’s not known for his paintings of children, but I think that his Baby at Play depicts the curiosity and wonder of a child’s mind unfolding and embracing the world better than any other painting I’ve ever seen. I almost left Antonio Mancini off the list because he’s still relatively unknown, but ultimately couldn’t because I was so captivated by his works when I saw them at the PMA last year.

As always, this is a personal list and, therefore, undoubtedly incomplete. If I’ve left off someone whose paintings of children you love, please share them with everyone in the comments. As I said above, this is a learning experience for me and, I hope, everyone else.

Vote for your favorite! Do it for the children.



[Many thanks to the beautiful Annie, wonderful wife and pinnacle of motherhood, for giving me the idea for this month's poll.]

Diving Beneath the Surface

Winslow Homer. The Rapids, Hudson River, 1894. Transparent watercolor, with traces of opaque watercolor, blotting, and scraping, over graphite, on thick, rough-textured, ivory wove paper, 384 x 546 mm.Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection.

Anyone who has dabbled in painting, such as I have, stares a little harder at certain works in museums, as if by looking the secrets of how masterpieces are made will suddenly spring out, like the trout leaping for the baited line in Winslow Homer’s The Rapids, Hudson River (above). Such fragile watercolors are so rarely exhibited and close inspection is so rarely possible that any hope of getting to the heart of Homer’s art seems impossible for anyone other than specialists. In the exhibition Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light, The Art Institute of Chicago has opened up its vault of twenty-five rarely seen watercolors by Homer and placed them under a microscope for all to see. In the catalogue to the exhibition, Kristi Dahm plays “CSI” with Homer’s watercolors to reveal the methods he employed and the tools he used while Martha Tedeschi’s text integrates those technical pieces with a survey of Homer’s influences and experimentation with the watercolor medium. “An exercise in close, focused looking,” Tedeschi writes, “this book aims to be a tool for artistic self-teaching as well as an enhanced appreciation of Homer’s ‘bold, unguided effort’ as America’s master practitioner of watercolor.” Like Homer’s, Tedeschi and Dahm’s aim is unfailingly true.

Winslow Homer. For to Be a Farmer’s Boy, 1887. Transparent and opaque watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, heightened with gum glaze, over graphite, on thick, rough-textured ivory wove paper (lower edge trimmed), 355 x 509 mm. Gift of Mrs. George T. Langhorne in memory of Edward Carson Waller.

Homer takes up watercolor painting in the summer of 1873 while staying in Gloucester, Massachusetts, at the age of thirty-seven. After witnessing the savagery of the American Civil War, Homer, like most of America, longed to move on and express a new American spirit. Many of these early watercolors show children and young women in the fresh air and enjoying the rural life. Although dating from 1887, For to Be a Farmer’s Boy (above) captures this feeling Homer hoped to convey. “As cities like New York became increasingly crowded and poluted,” Tedeschi writes, “the importance of fresh air and exercise—particularly for children—became part of a widespread interest in health and hygiene in which a sound body was closely associated with moral and social well-being.” Homer paints these early watercolors with a heavy dependence on opaque watercolor, but eventually explores the versatility and vibrancy of transparent watercolor for a greater range of effects. Lest Homer be seen as a simplistic portrayer of the American dream, Tedeschi uses watercolors by Homer of African-American children to demonstrate the artist’s sympathy for African Americans facing the failure of Reconstruction. And lest Homer be seen as an isolationist American, Tedeschi follows Homer’s encounter with the watercolors of J.M.W. Turner in a series of scenes of the Gloucester coast with different atmospheric effects.

Winslow Homer. The Watcher, Tynemouth, 1882. Transparent and opaque watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, heightened with gum glaze, over graphite, on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream wove paper (all edges trimmed), 213 x 377 mm. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection.

After seeing Turner’s amazing oil painting The Slave Ship in Boston, Homer travels to England in 1880 to examine and learn from Turner’s watercolors firsthand. “It was only through immediate experience that he could appreciate their color,” Judith Walsh writes in her essay on Homer’s time in England. Walsh’s pursuit of Homer’s pursuit of Turner fits in nicely with Franklin Kelly’s essay on Turner’s American reception in the catalogue to the NGA’s Turner exhibition (which I reviewed here). In addition to confronting Turner face to face, Homer visits the British Museum and studies the drawings of Michelangelo and Raphael. From those Renaissance draftsmen, Homer discovers “the elements of his new drawing style—rhythmic groupings, bodies in easy motion or coiled in tension, and drapery lifted by the wind,” Walsh writes. The Watcher, Tynemouth (above) illustrates Homer using the lessons he learned in England, employing the subtle coloring and atmospheric style of Turner while emulating the Renaissance drawings of flowing drapery as the winds pull the woman’s clothes. Upon Homer’s return to New York in 1882, Tedeschi writes, “[c]ritics were quick to see in these new paintings the grandeur and stability of Italian Renaissance drawing, and a new willingness to reckon with the most profound concepts of life and death, of heroism, disaster, and survival, and of the shock and awe of nature.” Thanks to his time in England, Homer could see the New World with new eyes and paint it with a new vision.

Winslow Homer. The Gulf Stream, 1889. Transparent watercolor, with touches of opaque watercolor and traces of blotting, over graphite, on moderately thick, moderately textured, ivory wove paper (lower edge trimmed), 288 x 509 mm. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection.

Essays on Homer’s travels to the Adirondacks, Quebec, and the Tropics all add new dimensions to his continual experimentation with watercolors. Each new locale allowed Homer to pursue his love of fishing and hunting, which brought him into intimate contact with nature. Each new place also provided different challenges to him as a colorist, thanks to the different light and vegetation. Armed with a translation of Michel-Eugene Chevreul’s theories on color, calling it his “Bible,” Homer faced each of these new problems rationally and experimentally. Whereas previous theorists believed that colorists were born and not made, Chevreul proposed that color effects followed scientific principles and could be learned. Walsh shows that Homer proved an apt pupil, especially while summering in the Bahamas and Cuba, where the clear light and almost transparent seas provided a paradise of color. The Gulf Stream (above) stands as one of several studies for the oil painting of the same name in which a lone figure finds himself and his tiny craft surrounded by sharks. Although the final oil gives some hope that the figure will survive in the form of a possible rescue by another ship in the distance, Homer’s study titled Sharks (The Derelict), in which the man is nowhere to be found on a boat literally crawling with sharks, shows that the artist considered every possible outcome.

Winslow Homer. After the Hurricane, Bahamas, 1899. Transparent watercolor, with touches of opaque watercolor, rewetting, blotting and scraping, over graphite, on moderately thick, moderately textured (twill texture on verso), ivory wove paper, 380 x 543 mm. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection.

I cannot stress how wonderfully integrated the technical and art history components of this book are. Tedeschi brings up an aspect of Homer’s art and you turn the page to a brief piece in which Dahm illustrates that point, often with views only be possible otherwise by pressing your nose against the original. When Dahm shows how Homer created the twinkle in an Adirondack guide’s eye with a flick of a knife, removing the top layer of paper and pigment to restore the white beneath, you feel like you were right there with Homer at the moment of creation. The Art Institute of Chicago’s website includes a “Behind the Scenes” page that offers views of Homer’s tools, modern watercolor tools, and videos of watercolor techniques in action and demonstrated in Homer’s works to bring you even closer to the action than the exhibition or catalogue can. You cannot come away from this exhibit without greater respect for Homer as a technician. For example, in After the Hurricane, Bahamas (above), you see both the amazing palette and draftsmanship of Homer as well as the dramatic flair of the artist, who leaves you wondering if the beached sailor has survived the wreck. Sadly, this exhibition also examines the ravages of time on Homer’s watercolors, which have suffered from mold and fading thanks to the environment. Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light preserves Homer’s continually evolving, growing vision in closely studying Homer’s achievements in the past and thus inspiring new artists’ achievements in the future.


[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a copy of Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light and to The Art Institute of Chicago for providing me with the images above from the exhibition.]