American Realism. Gerry Souter

“primary subjects” seen in the painting were supported by underlying “secondary subjects” that enforced the mood and had religious undertones inspired by the revelations of God.

      Though Allston died when Homer was just seven years old, the presence of the Great Man was everywhere in the Boston-Cambridge neighbourhoods where he had painted and written. Poetic tributes, exhibitions of his works and publications of his lectures, edited by Richard Henry Dana Jr. – author of Two Years Before the Mast – created a virtual Allston cult. Homer was surrounded by Allston’s acolytes and could not have avoided the artist’s work and philosophies. Homer’s contemporaries and close associates who knew of Allston’s impact claimed they recognised the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ subjects in Homer’s paintings and understood the ‘secret’ to the success of the works. To appreciate Allston’s romantic sensibilities, one of his poems follows.

      Art

      O Art, high gift of Heaven! How oft defamed

      When seeming praised! To most a craft that fits,

      By dead, prescriptive Rule, the scattered bits

      Of gathered knowledge; even so misnamed

      By some who would invoke thee; but not so

      By him, – the noble Tuscan – who gave birth

      To forms unseen of man, unknown to Earth,

      Now living habitants; he felt the glow

      Of thy revealing touch, that brought to view

      The invisible Idea; and he knew,

      E’en by his inward sense, its form was true:

      ‘T was life to life responding, – highest truth!

      So, through Elisha’s faith, the Hebrew Youth

      Beheld the thin blue air to fiery chariots grow.

Washington Allston, Lectures & Poems, 1850.

      At the age of nineteen in 1855, Homer was apprenticed to the Boston lithography shop of John Henry Bufford who had studied under New York’s George Endicott and Nathaniel Currier (soon to be partnered with James Merritt Ives) to find practical applications for his art.

      He remained at Bufford’s for two years and then embarked as a freelance illustrator finding sketch work at Ballou’s Pictorial and Harpers Weekly. He opened a studio at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City. Located at 51 West Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the Studio Building was a virtual rabbit warren of artist studios that radiated out from a central domed gallery. Artists from all over the country came to the location and took rooms nearby, giving Greenwich Village its new and future reputation as a Bohemian arts centre.

      Winslow Homer, Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), c. 1873–1876.

      Oil on canvas, 61.5 × 97 cm.

      National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., gift of the W. L. and May T. Mellon Foundation.

      At Harpers, where he remained a frequent contributor for years, his sketches made in the field were carved into wood blocks for multiple printing. He also copied images imported from England so they could be used to illustrate stories. And then the largest story he would ever cover burst as artillery shells slammed into Fort Sumter and the American Civil War flashed to life.

      Homer was attending classes at the National Academy of Design, studying under Frédéric Rondel, a landscape artist who had just joined the teaching staff. Harpers Weekly armed Homer with sketch pads and sent him off to join the Union Army of the Potomac in 1861. He remained, following the troops and botched campaigns of Major General George B. McClellan. He drew their camps on picket duty, playing cards between battles, and worked alongside photographers whose bulky glass plate cameras could not produce pictures of any troops in action. Their photographic prints had to be turned into steel engravings in order to be printed in newspapers or by Harpers. Most of his sketches differed greatly from the heroic work of Eastman Johnson who produced The Wounded Drummer Boy. Homer seemed more drawn to the homey non-action moments that happened between battles, as with Home Sweet Home showing two Union soldiers boiling water over a fire in an encampment. These intimate scenes became popular with Harpers’ readers, showing how their boys lived when they weren’t fighting or marching. Because of the war’s huge casualty totals, these images of men bonding on the battlefield were comforting.

      While many of his drawings copied the stiff compositions of the photographers, he managed to capture some unique, journalistic images such as Sharpshooter on Picket Duty. This drawing shows a Union sniper aiming a rifled musket using a long telescopic gun sight. The new technology allowed marksmen to use these sights to make long range shots and kill enemy officers, harass artillery units and sink the morale of enemy troops. The name ‘sharpshooter’ referred to a specific Sharps breech-loading rifle that, when combined with the telescopic sight, became a deadly and feared weapon. Any snipers captured by opposing troops were usually shot as being godless, cold-blooded murderers. This drawing and another one, Prisoners from the Front, were turned into paintings in Homer’s studio after the war, resulting in his being elected a full academician.

      Winslow Homer, The Signal of Distress, 1890.

      Oil on canvas, 62 × 98 cm.

      Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

      In 1867, he travelled to Paris where Prisoners from the Front was hung in the American section of the Paris World Exposition called the ‘Universal Exhibition’. As with the British Great Exposition of 1851, art was considered a secondary attraction when compared to steam engines, railway trains and mass-produced manufactured products and processes, plus exotic goods and cultures from distant lands. The Americans shipped over a tribe of Indians and their tepees that became a hit for the show. Excluded from the show were the ‘young naturalists’, Cézanne, Degas, Monet and Renoir, who set up their own exhibitions outside the Exposition. The hall devoted to art was small, requiring paintings be hung in rows up to the ceiling. Still, Homer managed to see a broad cross-section of European art from Impressionists to hoary academicians grinding out neo-classical allegories. The London Times wrote:

      “In the exhibition palace, one wanted in particular, apart from landscape painting by Rousseau or Français, to see exotic art or images of history in the academic, neo-classicist style. In the event, the walls were mainly covered with works of the panel members, who included: Gérôme, Dupré, Bouguereau, Millet, Daubigny, Huet and Corot, who, other than was the case with Courbet, were each represented with between eight and fourteen paintings. Genre pictures were particularly popular and represented. Although only works were supposed to be exhibited which had been completed after 1 January 1855, the exhibition proved in the final analysis to be a retrospective of recognised artists. Art was, in its undecorated, crowded and uncomfortable presentation, one product among many, only an “agreeable accessoire”, as Charles Blanc, who was himself a panel member, expressed it in 1867 in the Le Temps newspaper[4]

      According to the New York Times previewing the show, “The best American works from the best private galleries and studios have been cheerfully placed at their (the U. S. Government) disposition. A collection of the highest character will in consequence be exhibited, instead of the crudities of unknown hands.”[5] While Homer’s painting, Prisoners from the Front bears a striking resemblance to Courbet’s Bonjour Monsieur Courbet with a foreground group against the angled horizon and activity behind them, the Parisians admired it for its closeness in style to the sugary allegorical academician Jean-Léon Gérôme.

      Homer stayed on in Paris for a year with his Boston chum, Albert Kelsey, sharing a flat. They were very close friends and had a photo taken that mocked the convention of wedding photography of the time with Kelsey standing behind the seated Homer with his hand on Homer’s shoulder.

4

Österreichisches Central-Commitee von der Weltausstelung zu Paris 1867 (http://www.expo2000.de/expo2000/geschichte)

5

«The Paris Universal Exposition of 1867», New York Times, December 25, 1866