File:Winslow Homer (1914) (14598040180).jpg

Identifier: whomer00coxk (find matches)
Title: Winslow Homer
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Cox, Kenyon
Subjects: Homer, Winslow, 1836-1910
Publisher: Privately Printed
Contributing Library: Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
actual. Being such an observer he was always making themost unexpected observations, and painting thingsthat were not only unpainted till then but, apparent*ly, unseen by anyone else. His water color sketches,in which he set down with astonishing succintnessand rapidity the things he saw, are a vast repertoryof such surprises; but even in his more deeply consid?ered and long wrought pictures he is constantly doingthings of a disturbing originality—painting aspects ofnature which another, if he had seen them, wouldconsider unpaintable. For Homer is afraid of nothingand trusts his own perceptions absolutely, having nonotion of traditions that must not be violated or o£limits that cannot be overstepped. That he has seena thing, and that it interested him, is reason enoughfor trying to paint it. Whether he fails or succeeds ishardly his affair—whether the result is pleasing orthe reverse is nothing to him—I saw it so; there itis.—The next time it will be a new observation, and 42
Text Appearing After Image:
until there is a new observation, he will paint no more.Many men have sat by a camp fire at night andhave enjoyed, in a dreamy way, watching the longcurves of light cut into the blue darkness by the as*cending sparks. Who but Homer would have madethem not an accessory but the principle subject of apicture? V/ho but Homer has seen or painted such athing as that flock of ravenous crows, starved by thelong winter, hunting a live fox through the heavysnow which retards his superior speed—one of themost superb animal pictures in the world, yet pro?duced by an artist who has painted no other? Hewishes to paint the sea by night, the foam of breakersdark against the glittering wake of the moon. Whoelse would not have feared to disturb the serenity ofnature by the presence of figures, or would have daredmore, at most, than the black, almost formless, groupof silent watchers on the rocks? Homer cuts his fore*ground with the long, straight line of the platform ofa summer cottage or hotel, and

Note About Images