Winslow Homer and his Eight bells - Essay Example

The painter of the sea: Winslow Homer and his Eight bells There have been of the sea, like James Fennimore Cooper and there have been poets of the sea, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But if there is a painter of the sea, it must be American artist Winslow Homer. When one thinks of Coleridge’s haunting lines from Ancient Mariner: Like a painted ship/ on a painted ocean, one cannot but be reminded of Homer’s Gulf Stream or Maine Coast or even his masterpiece Eight Bells. Robert Hughes’s1 assessment of the writer is powerful: “Some major artists create popular stereotypes that last for decades; others never reach into popular culture at all. Winslow Homer was a painter of the first kind. Even today, 150 years after his birth, one sees his echoes on half the magazine racks of America. Homer was not, of course, the first ‘sporting artist’ in America, but he was the undisputed master of the genre, and he brought to it both intense observation and a sense of identification with the landscape — just at the cultural moment when the religious Wilderness of the nineteenth century, the church of nature, was shifting into the secular Outdoors, the theater of manly enjoyment. If you want to see Thoreaus America turning into Teddy Roosevelt’s, Homer the watercolorist is the man to consult.” That’s perhaps the most apt description of the man who have been a sincere chronicler of natural life in fin de siècle eighteenth century America, almost in a similar way that Thomas Hardy’s Edwardian poems related to that of England. But Homer was also in elements when he drew the sea, especially how humans react and relate to it when the water universe is at its most fierce. Homer’s place in Amercian art is secured though he was largely a self-taught artist who in the beginning of his career worked as a commercial illustrator. “…(Homer) received little instruction from masters or in art schools. He has studied nature faithfully and he has found his way to complete expresion almost alone. He is not primarily a pinter of the figure, as Millet was”, writes critic William Coffinin The Century Magazine.2 Later Coffin adds, “Homer has not made much of the figure part of his compositions, except in a few cases, but in so far as he painted figures he has treated them synthetically, as Millet did. But he has much less grasp of form. His best works are pictures of the sea”.3 He later took to oil painting much later. But his best works were almost exclusively in watercolor. As Elizabeth Johns says : “In 1863 he learned to paint in oil and over the next few years created thought provoking figural scenes of the nation at war and then, after the war, of the middle class at leisure. In the 1870s he became a watercolorist of great power, focusing his attention on the natural world of sky and grass and water. After shifting his location from New York to New England in 1883, he spent the rest of his life creating stunning pictures of the ocean meeting the rocky shores of Prouts Neck, Maine.”4 It is this phase of Homer’s career which found climax in Eight Bells. In ships of yore, where digital automation was unheard of, that is, ships during Homer’s time, eight bells meant the end of one watch and the beginning of another. The watches then were four hours long. Like a sand clock, a half-hour glass kept the time. When the glass turned, the bell would ring. After eight bells, the watch would be changed. Eight bells is hence the end of a period and hence can interpreted as the moment when one’s time is up. In a sailor’s life, in nautical terminology eight bells can read as an obituary, a euphemism for death. Homer’s materpiece, which shows two men on the edge of what look’s like a ship’s deck, noting down the hour and looking through a meauring optical device while a fury rages in front of them. They are clealy at midsea and the title suggests an ominous arrival of the final time when the eight bells would ring for the final time. Of Homer’s magnetic seascapes, Eight Bells is perhaps the most vissually arresting, not least for having a palpable sense of foreboding hanging over the painting. The credit for it goes to Homer’s fullblooded technique in watercolour. "You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors," Homer once remarked. And that is entirely prescient. Hughes has a wonderful description why Homer’s reputation and posterity wrests almost entirely with watercolour: "Watercolour is tricky stuff, an amateurs but really a virtuosos medium. It is the most light-filled of all ways of painting, but its luminosity depends on the white of the paper shining through thin washes of pigment. One has to work from light to dark, not (as with oils) from dark to light. It is hospitable to accident (Homers seas, skies and Adirondack hills are full of chance blots and free merging of color) but disaster-prone as well. One slip, and the veil of atmosphere turns into a mud puddle, a garish swamp. The stuff favors broad effects; nothing proclaims the amateur more clearly than niggling and overcorrection. It can be violated (Homer sometimes did his highlights by tearing strips of paper away to show white below), but it also demands an exacting precision of the hand-and an eye that can translate solid into fluid in a wink. Homer understood and exploited all these needs of watercolor better than his contemporaries, and he applied them where they most belonged--to the recording of immediate experience. A painting like Key West, Hauling Anchor, 1903, has a sparkling directness hardly attainable in oil. It is so simple-looking - blue sea, white boat, a patch or two of red shirt, the red picked up again at the boats waterline and in a jaunty lick or two of carmine reflection - that at first one does not mark the skill that went into it, the power of epigrammatic observation implicit in Homers ability to convey the milky blue water over a Florida sand bottom in two washes of cerulean and cobalt. One knows how little time it took to see and how little to do; but one senses the years of self-critical practice behind it. No wonder Homer is the despair of every amateur.5 Homer was so besotted with nature that he made the wild coast his second home where he would spend hours to record in mind first and then in canvas, the changing colour, texture and rhythm of the sky and the sea. “The sun will not rise or set without my notice, and thanks," Homer wrote in 1895, out of gratitude for the rhythms of nature that had informed his pictures and his life. He was almost sixty years old. In his home by the ocean at Prouts Neck, Maine, he had observed for more than a decade the rising and setting sun, incoming and outgoing tides, and gathering and diminishing storms. In fact, he had been attentive to the world around him all his life, in the way that he lived and in what he chose to paint. From the beginning of his career, his admirers had praised him for "painting what he saw," which meant that they, too, saw what was critical to Homer and found these things important.” 6 Homer’s Maine coast phase is best described by Barbara Weinberg in her catalogue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “In the summer of 1883, Homer moved from New York to Prouts Neck, Maine, a peninsula ten miles south of Portland. Except for vacation trips to the Adirondacks, Canada, Florida, and the Caribbean, where he produced dazzling watercolors, Homer lived at Prouts Neck until his death. He enjoyed isolation and was inspired by privacy and silence to paint the great themes of his career: the struggle of people against the sea and the relationship of fragile, transient human life to the timelessness of nature. In ambitious works of the 1880s, men challenge the oceans power with their own strength and cunning or respond to the oceans overwhelming force in scenes of dramatic rescue. By about 1890, however, Homer left narrative behind to concentrate on the beauty, force, and drama of the sea itself. In their dynamic compositions and richly textured passages, his late seascapes capture the look and feel (and even suggest the sound) of masses of onrushing and receding water. For Homers contemporaries, these were the most extravagantly admired of all his works. They remain among his most famous today, appreciated for their virtuoso brushwork, depth of feeling, and hints of modernist abstraction.”7 But the deeper one goes into studying Homer, the one gets aware of the deeply introspective relation Homer shared with nature, a sort that only painters can. As Jones wistfully reflects: “In studying Homer, I came to see how such a developmental approach reveals underlying patterns in Homers life and work and illuminates many dimensions of his career. … This approach, used with appropriate attention to his realistic style, simple and yet profound themes, and personal reticence, … throws light on the crucible of selfhood within which Homer created his pictures.” 8 Eight Bells, along with other works of the same era carries late Homer’s signature concerns. Eight Bells and some of its ‘partner paintings’ (The Herring Net, The Gulf Stream, Maine Coast); offer a glimpse of his ouvre. Homer’s Fishing Boats, Key West, is a stunning watercolor showing of hard sunlight, through a rapid application of multiple surfaces. This picture is for the “rustle of the sailcloth lifted by a phantom breeze”. Northeaster shows a keen intensity of form. While The Gulf Stream is a dramatic and vivid work. Some of his other works during the same time include Hurricane , On a Lee Shore, West Point, Prouts Neck, Maine, Cape Trinity, Saguenay River and Right and Left. A brief look at the relation between American literature and the sea, especially in the nineteenth century will further accentuate the significance of Eight Bells and its contemporary paintings. Early American sea literature is believed to have begun with the oral traditions of Native Americans, who recited stories of the common experiences of whaling and fishing. Early American settlers wrote of their experiences at sea. By the first half of the nineteenth century, the sea occupied the same place in the American psyche as the American frontier occupied after 1850. Seen as a place of freedom and soul-searching for the individual, the sea was largely romanticized by Americans who heralded it as a safe haven far from the evils and distractions of society. One of the most significant nineteenth-century pieces of literature documenting these truths is Two Years Before the Mast (1840) by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815-1882). It was the romantic view of the sailor and of life at sea that prevailed throughout this first half of the nineteenth century, however, and it was during this time that American sea fiction was born. Known as the originator of the genre, James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) dominated American sea fiction, eventually writing twelve maritime sea novels. To Cooper, the sea was a positive force, offering freedom and building character in those who chose to experience maritime life. Although Cooper is remembered for establishing the genre, Herman Melville (1819-1891) is arguably the best known writer of American sea fiction. With several years of experience at sea, Melville used many of the settings and events from his own life in his novels, reshaping them as fiction in an effort to understand the world around him. Melville published his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, in 1851. In essence an epistemological quest, the novel is, on the surface, the story of Ahab the mad captain of a whaling ship and his zealous search for the great albino whale who had maimed him earlier. Homer has never mentioned his influences in detail but along with his deep sense attachment to the details of the nature he was closely watching, Homer also gave a metaphysical vision to his paintings which when seen alongside the writing of Melville shows deep empathy of the former for the latter, if not always a conscious one. As Jones says “Homers paintings, I believe, come to us as marks of confidence in the importance of observation, its intimate relation to life, and the ultimate reality of nature. His images are the work of a man who lived one life as we all do each part informing all the other parts.” 9 Eight Bells remains a great artist’s most powerful tribute to epic theatre of nature. As Coffin observes, sometimes it is asked, “’what might not Winslow Homer have done if he had a thorough art education at the beginning of his career?’ I fancy that those who ask this question do not know what a great school nature is when the pupil is a persistent searcher for truth and has the strength and purpose that has enabled Mr Homer to find adequate forms of expression in his on way.” 10 In Eight Bells all of Homer’s genius comes to climax. As Jones says, Homer is “the man who gave us who gives us pictures that on first look are transparent; at closer study become reticent; and on reflection evoke what is ultimately inexplicable, the course of human life and the universe in which it unfolds.” 11 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Read More