Atlantic Star:Winslow Homer @ the National Gallery.

Water! Water! Everywhere! At the National Gallery's Winslow Homer:Force of Nature exhibition, you'll come into contact with so much water that you'll wish you'd taken an umbrella. Or at the very least worn a mackintosh. The salty brine froths away, often beneath ominously cloudy skies, so often you can almost taste it.

People sail in it, fish in it, row in it, bathe in it, and, in some cases, seem to almost live in it. Water stands as both a background, a foreground, and even a character in its own right in Homer's paintings but part of the appeal of the National's exhibition is that it doesn't just show Homer as a maritime painter. The curators are bold enough to show some of his terra firma paintings and, in combination with his seascapes, these make a good case for Homer being one of the finest, one of the most under-rated, artists of his era.

Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (1873-76)

 

Born in 1836, in Boston, Massachusetts, and growing up in nearby Cambridge, Homer was initially taught by his mother, a gifted amateur water colourist, Homer first came of age as an artist during the American Civil War (1861-65). A conflict that would imbue in his art a lifelong obsession with mortality and with human struggle.

 

Sometimes with other humans. More often with the elemental forces of nature. During the Civil War, Homer moved to the front lines of the Union Army in Virginia and there he captured moments that he hoped would stand as ciphers for the enormity of the vast conflict. He saw in the war something that remains as relevant as ever. Perhaps more now than even before. He saw that the American dream was just that:- a dream, and one which we could all wake up from at any moment. It took a collective will of all American people to stay in the dream state and not all Americans wanted to.

Sharpshooter (1863)

Sharpshooter shows a lone Union sniper perched in a tree using modern military technology to pick off unsuspecting victims from up to a mile away. Winslow Homer could barely have been able to imagine just how many lone gunmen would make use of such hardware to gun down innocent peacetime victims in the 159 years since the painting was made.

Prisoners From The Front, painted one year after the war had ended during the so called Reconstruction period, shows the smartly dressed Union Army capture of a group of dishevelled Confederate soldiers. The fact they are painted in a horizontal framing, it is believed, is Homer's way of suggesting there is no longer any need for hierarchy. All men must be considered equal.

Prisoners From The Front (1866)

The Cotton Pickers (1876)

 

A Visit From The Old Mistress (1876)

Even women. Even women of colour. At least up to a point. Following the war, Homer's paintings would move on to more everyday settings and 1876's A Visit From The Old Mistress shows former slaves who have now been freed. Though they are, of course, still servants to their white mistress.

 

A Basket Of Clams shows what may have been an everyday scene in Gloucester, Massachusetts at the time. Two young men with the aforesaid basket between them walk barefoot on the beach, one of them completely unaware that a dead shark is lying in their path. It's a strangely wistful image painted in muted tones as if to emphasise both the mundanity of the situation and its extraordinary potential.

 

A Basket Of Clams (1873)

Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide) (1870)

With Homer, ordinary scenes are often rendered extraordinary with a more considered viewing. The woman wringing her wet clothes out in Eagle Head was considered almost pornographic at the time (!) and Dressing For The Carnival shows two women sewing a young man into his Junkanoo costume of the Lord of Misrule. All ready to celebrate black liberation. Something Homer returns to time and again in his paintings. By modern standards, he may not stand out as a particularly 'woke' artist but some of his ideas and themes were well ahead of the times he operated in.

 

Dressing For The Carnival (1877)

The Veteran In A New Field (1865)

Snap The Whip (1872)

He painted grief, he painted hope, he painted endurance, and he painted hard work (The Veteran In A New Field) but he also painted fun and games in more innocent works like 1872's Snap The Whip. Even though, if you look to the far left of the painting, one of the children has broken off from the chain. Homer, it seems, always remembered to show those left behind.

Or at least that's the interpretation the curators are giving to Homer's work. Homer himself did not like to explain his pictures. The two smart ladies in Promenade On The Beach are looking at something but Homer wouldn't say what. They also appear to be based on real people but yet again Homer refused to confirm or deny this. A Homer image can be whatever you want it to be. It's up to you.

Promenade On The Beach (1880)

Hound And Hunter (1892)

He was keen though to make clear that in 1892's Hound and Hunter, the deer in the image is already dead and that the hunter is not drowning it. Homer seemed to appreciate animal life as much as he did human and with Charles Darwin's Origins of Species coming out when Homer was in his twenties he took a great deal of care in presenting his animal specimens correctly.

They could be metaphorical, or allegorical, or they could, in some cases - like the Channel Bass, just be what they are. The curators suggest Homer as an early environmentalist but that seems, to me, a rather ambitious attempt at retrofitting his images to tie them in with today's most pressing concerns. The fish, for me, is just a fish. Strictly speaking a painting of a fish.

Channel Bass (1904)

Right And Left (1909)

The ducks are just ducks and probably not, as an information board at the National has it, representative of man's inhumanity to man. In 1881, Homer journeyed to England and settled in the North Sea fishing community of Cullercoats. There he painted everyday working lives of fishermen and fisherwomen and when he returned to America nineteen months later he continued with these themes.

Using them to highlight human vulnerability in the face of nature's mighty power and also to make points about class and gender divisions in maritime society and society in general. Though, as ever, the paintings aren't easy to 'read'. They open themselves up to multiple interpretations. Often they're best enjoyed quite simply as images of coastal life.

To The Rescue (1886)

The Life Line (1884)

The Fog Warning (1885)

The Gale (1883-93)

In all its simplicity, all its terror, all its peril, and all its beauty. Fisherman look for rescue from distant schooners, women in danger of drowning are winched to safety, and mothers with children on their backs brave tempestuous gales. Homer's female portraits of this era border on the Amazonian. It's noteworthy how often the women seem to be far stronger than the men.

At least when the women are painted alone or with children. When men enter the picture the women seem to begin to struggle, to go under the water. They have to be saved and as luck would have it there always seems to be a few athletic, often topless, men around to do that saving.

Inside The Bar (1883)

Undertow (1886)

The Life Brigade (1882-83)

Back in America, Homer settled in Prouts Neck, Maine. In winter it was cold and inhopsitable so he would travel to warmer climes:- Florida, Cuba, Bermuda, and the Bahamas which he described as "the best place I've found". Of course, while he was in these tropical hotspots he continued to paint and it's not surprising that these works are not so cloudy as those he made in Maine or on Tyneside.

The dark blue waters and verdant foliage of the Caribbean is a joy to look at but here, too, the power of nature remains a threat in the form of destructive hurricanes and circling predatory sharks. Man, also, remains an existential danger to fellow man as the various nations of this part of the world remain states which allow slavery or have moved on from it - but not much.

Sponge Fishermen, Bahamas (1885)

A Garden In Nassau (1885)

Searchlight On Harbor Entrance, Santiago De Cuba (1902)

Hurricane, Bahamas (1898)

The Bather (1899)

Nassau (1899)

The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906)

Sharks; Also The Derelict (1885)

I loved Homer's painting of sharks, of proud and muscular bathers, and of the Nassau Sponge Exchange (!) though closer inspection shows black islanders excluded from the large homes of white traders and US searchlights parked up on Cuban shorelines trying to stymie any hope of independence or self-governance. Hurricanes, it is suggested, signify the destruction on Caribbean people and their islands by imperial powers. The sharks, it was believed at the time, could swallow a man whole. Homer leaves it to the viewer to decide if the sharks are the most deadly threat.

A clue may be found in Homer's later work. In the 1890s, with Homer now in his mid-fifties, humans became less central to the paintings he made. In some cases they were removed altogether. The raw beauty of nature, particularly the sea, became the theme in its own right. He became something of a recluse and refused invitations to parties and Thanksgiving events so that he could use what time he had left, another twenty years - he died in 1910, over to the solitary pursuit of painting the seas around Maine and even north into Canada.

Northeaster (1895)

Driftwood (1909)

Kissing The Moon (1904)

Winter Coast (1890)

The spray of the water was intensified, the rocks looming over the sea became more fearful and awesome, and the few people who do appear seem to be cowed, beaten, by nature. Be it snow or waves. Winslow Homer, it seems, had always been obsessed with the natural world. As he grew elder he became so consumed by it and its indifference to mankind that he gave himself into it. It sounds like a lonely and tough life. But the art it produced remains as powerful today as it must have been at the time. A splendid show.

Cape Trinity, Saguenay River, Moonlight (1904)

Bautain studio - Winslow Homer in Paris (1867)