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The North Woods (Playing Him)

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The North Woods (Playing Him)

1894
watercolor on paper
15 1/8 in. x 21 1/2 in. (38.42 cm x 54.61 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederic H. Curtiss, 1960.13

Winslow Homer
American
1836–1910

(For biographical information on Winslow Homer, see entry under Homer, Fishwives 1938.1, )

Although Winslow Homer generally declined to interpret his own work, he occasionally penned marginal comments on his watercolors that indicate his degree of satisfaction with what he had made. "This will do the business," he crowed on the bottom margin of one watercolor. "A picture for a dark corner," he wrote on the back of a particularly bright example. And on the reverse of In the North Woods he wrote, "This is not so bad."

In the North Woods was painted in the Adirondacks, probably from Homer's usual base at the North Woods Club, a private hunting and fishing association he helped found in 1886. The club was located on the shores of Mink Pond, near Minerva, New York. Homer spent at least a week there, and sometimes as long as two months, almost every year in the 1890s. He went to the Adirondacks to fish, hunt, and paint in watercolors, and the works he produced in these surroundings are among his greatest in the medium.

In the North Woods followed such watercolors as Adirondack Lake (1889, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Sunrise, Fishing in the Adirondacks (1892, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), which also feature a solitary fisherman in a canoe, his rod and line a taut arc against a dark screen of foliage. In these works, the fisherman is seen from a great distance and is small and anonymous; the focus is on the great masses of trees and water. Here, it is the solitary woodsman who is emphasized; the tension and excitement of the strike is dramatized by his outstretched arms, which become an extension of his fishing rod, and by his head, turned back to regard his prey.

Homer's response to nature was intense, and although this image has a fresh, just-observed quality, it was actually rather heavily worked. His technique here is a vigorous mixture of layered washes, areas of color scraped away and then painted over (the ripples of water at lower right), and blotted passages in the distant hills. To render the fishing line, a nearly invisible arc of white against the dark trees, Homer scraped away color in a single long curve, then painted over yellow for the pole and brown where the line is visible against the gray sky. The mysterious depths of the pond are suggested by layers of wash; the play of light on the water is indicated by the juxtaposition of strokes of opaque and transparent color.

The fisherman's unspoiled solitude, seen in the pale morning light, the figure's concentrated expression, and the companionable silence of the water, is typical of the idealized view of nature that Homer created in his Adirondacks watercolors. He presents nature as the preserve of the true fisherman, completely at home in the wilderness, rather than as the playground of the convivial recreational fishermen who began visiting the Adirondacks in great numbers by the 1870s.

Ironically, it was the increased popularity of fishing as a sport among the middle class, and Homer's genius at expressing the lure of rural outdoor life, that led the Boston lithography firm of Louis Prang and Co. to purchase In the North Woods in 1894. Prang used it as the basis of a handsome lithograph, The North Woods, produced that same year, a print that was unusually successful in reproducing Homer's subtle colors and layers of tone. Inexplicably, it was not a commercial success, and Prang soon abandoned its ambitious project to issue "Water Color Facsimilie (s) [sic]" of Homer's paintings. The watercolor was then sold at the 1899 auction of the Prang firm's collection. It was purchased "for something under $500," as its new owner, Frederic Curtiss of Boston, recalled. The Curtisses hung it in their home for many years before donating it to the Currier in 1960.

CT

REFERENCES

"Winslow Homer's North Woods: A Recent Acquisition." Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin, November 1960, pp. 1-2.

Helen A. Cooper. Winslow Homer Watercolors. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986.


Exhibition
1894 Doll and Richards, Boston, MA, no. 3.

1923 Paris Exposition, Exhibition of American watercolors by the Copley Society of Boston.

1936-1937 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, "Winslow Homer Exhibition." Dec. 15, 1936 - Jan. 15, 1937.

1966 Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, "Winslow Homer at Prout's Neck." July 8 - Sept. 4.

1972 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, "Nature and Focus - American Painting in the 19th Century." Jan. 21 - Apr. 2.

1973 "Winslow Homer." Traveled to: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, April 3 - June 3; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, July 1 - Aug. 15; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Sept. 8 - Oct. 21.

1976-1977 DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, "Homer to Hopper: Sixty Years of American Watercolors." Dec. 12, 1976 - Feb. 6, 1977.

1978 Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, "Winslow Homer: Works on Paper." Sept. 19 - Nov. 5.

1980 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "More Than Meets the Eye; Hidden Collections of the Currier Gallery of Art." Jan. 12 - March 2.

1980 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Watercolors from the Permanent Collection." March 3 - May 4.

1982 Sharon Arts Center, Sharon, NH, "The Sportsman's Art." June 1 - July 15.

1985 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Watercolors from the Permanent Collection." June 4 - Aug. 25.

1987 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Watercolors from the Permanent Collection." May 19 - July 19.

1989 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Glistening Washes: American Watercolors from the Permanent Collection." May 9 - July 9.

1994 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Brush to Paper: Masterpieces of American Watercolor from the Currier." March 8 - May 15.

1995-1997 "American Art from the Currier Gallery of Art." Organized by the Currier Gallery of Art and the American Federation of Arts. Traveled to: Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, Dec. 3, 1995 - Jan. 28, 1996; Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, FL, Mar. 15 - Apr. 7, 1996; Art Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke, VA, Aug. 10 - Oct. 13, 1996; The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN, Feb. 2 - Mar. 30, 1997; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Apr. 25 - June 22, 1997; Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, July 18 - Sept. 8, 1997, cat. no. 20. (Not exhibited at the Dixon or Frye ).

2002-2003 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, "Casting a Spell: Winslow Homer, Artist and Angler." Dec. 7, 2002 - Feb. 9, 2003 (Organized with Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX. Not exhibited at the Amon Carter).

2010 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "From Homer to Hopper: American Watercolor Masterworks from the Currier Museum of Art." March 6 - June 7.

Provenance
Doll & Richards, 1899
Louis Prang Collection
Purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Haines Curtiss at auction, 1904
Gift to Currier Gallery of Art, 1960

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