The Obtuse Bard

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) was an artist of few words and much action. His paintings and watercolors depict moments of contemplation often surrounded by turmoil. Man against man, man against nature, and nature against innocence are recurring themes. The beloved Yankee chronicler of the second half of the nineteenth century, largely self-taught, captured the fading light of agrarian New England to elevate his genre scenes into portraits of profound expression. He started as an artist of the Civil War. His first assignments were battlefield dispatches for Harper’s Monthly. Over his prodigious career he edited down his observations into fraught, ambiguous narratives. With daring passages of abstraction, his late seascapes, of waves crashing against rocks around his home in Prouts Neck, Maine, prefigured the twentieth century’s modern turn while remaining true to his regional vision.