ON VIEW

Famed for his powerful images of the American scene, Winslow Homer ranks among the nation's greatest painters. The artist, born in Boston in 1836, was encouraged to draw from childhood, and at the age of nineteen he entered the well-known lithography firm of John H. Bufford. There he spent some two years working on sheet music covers and other popular media, and when his term with Bufford ended in 1857, he commenced work as a freelance illustrator. His assignments frequently took him to New York City, and in 1859 Homer moved there to be closer to his subject matter. Around this time, Homer began to study fine art, and in 1861 he studied briefly with landscapist Frederic Rondel (1826-1892).

During the 1860s Homer covered the Civil War for the news journal Harper's Weekly. His wartime experiences became the basis of a series of military genre paintings, whose remarkable freshness gained favorable notice from the New York art world. Elected a full member of the National Academy of Design by 1865, Homer spent the next fifteen years depicting domestic and rural scenes in which women and children predominate. In 1881 Homer interrupted his work in New York to live and work in the fishing village of Cullercoats on the Northumbrian coast of England. After nearly two years during which he painted numerous heroic images of fisherfolk, the artist returned to the United States and settled on the Maine coast at Prout's Neck. There he concentrated on seascapes, some of which rank among the finest paintings of his career. Toward the end of his life, Homer spent several winters in Florida and the Bahamas, where the tropical light gave new color to his work, particularly in watercolor. The artist suffered a debilitating stroke in 1908 but continued to work steadily until his health failed him completely during the first half of 1910. Homer died at Prout's Neck on September 29, 1910.

While the exact reason behind Homer's decision to leave New York and settle in the fishing village of Cullercoats is elusive, it is clear that Homer felt a keen affinity for his subject matter: rugged men and women whose hardihood stood in marked contrast to the sweet farm children and winsome belles who had populated much of the artist's work of the preceding decade. By the time of Homer's arrival in 1881, Cullercoats was already known among artists and travelers for its picturesque inhabitants. Few painters, however, could match Homer for the strength and grandeur with which he would imbue the village's fisherfolk.

Art historians cite Homer's sojourn in Cullercoats as a turning point during which the artist moved away from an interest in individual human subjects toward the universal theme of Man versus Nature. Painted in 1883, shortly after his return to America, the Currier's Fishwives is among the earliest works to reflect this major shift in Homer's outlook. Standing on a stony slab at the edge of a foaming sea, three sturdy fishwives look out over the waves in the direction of two ships struggling against the wind. Masses of blue-gray clouds scud across a bleak sky, and in the foreground, pools of sea spray reinforce the impression of wind, wet, and cold. Oblivious to the severity of the weather, the three women seem as hard as the rock on which they stand. Yet their insistent focus on the faraway ships suggests not merely their concern for their loved ones but the overarching human capacity for hope and endurance.

During his stay in Cullercoats, Homer devoted much of his efforts to watercolor. Formerly held to be a genteel and somewhat frivolous medium better suited to women and amateurs, watercolor began gaining ground among American painters, including Homer, during the 1870s. In his Cullercoats paintings, Homer became one of the first to test the limits of watercolor, creating works of depth and power that could hold their own alongside works done in oil on canvas. In Fishwives, Homer saturates the paper with masses of somber color, creating a bold image that stands in stark contrast to the delicately tinted flower studies and landscapes that were typically associated with the medium.

Fishwives was one of the many gifts of art that Homer presented to his brother Charles Savage Homer Jr. Since the artist's death in 1910, it has been recognized as an important work and has appeared in a number of significant exhibitions, including the Homer memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1911), the Association Franco-Americaine's "Exposition d'Art Americain: John S. Sargent, R.A., Dodge MacKnight, Winslow Homer, Paul Manship" Paris,1923, and the Homer centennial exhibition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1936. Most recently it was included in the major Homer retrospective staged by the National Gallery of Art in 1995-96. Following the death of Charles Homer's widow in 1937, Fishwives passed into the hands of relatives, from whom it was purchased by the Currier Museum of Art through the William Macbeth Gallery in 1938.

VSD

REFERENCES

Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly. Winslow Homer. Ex. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1996.

Albert ten Eyck Gardner. Winslow Homer: American Artist: His World and His Work. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1961.

Robert Macbeth. Winslow Homer. New York: Living American Art, 1940.