IN the American section at the recent Paris Exposition, no painter made a more distinct mark than Winslow Homer. The foreign critics seemed to be conscious of a fresh note in his pictures: one not traceable to European influences, still less suggestive of Parisian technique; a note of unmistakable force and independence. Could it be considered representatively American?

Almost for the first time this question appeared to be asked with a real interest in the answer. Foreigners had long been acquainted with painters from America, who came over in increasing numbers, and showed a remarkable faculty of quickly assimilating the teaching and influences of Europe. But were there any distinctively American painters? Those students who remained in Europe, though many of them were individual and forceful men, merged themselves more or less completely in their new environment. What, then, became of those who returned to America? Presumably they carried back with them the Europeanisms they had acquired. So far as could be judged from the showing made by American painters at previous expositions, they were but reflecting the influences of Paris or of German and English painting. Was there, in fact, as distinguished from art in America, any American art? And with a languid interest in a matter so far detached from their personal knowledge, the foreigners had answered the question for themselves, negatively. However, the Exposition of 1900 contained an American section which revealed a great deal of motive and character that could not be lightly dismissed as but a reflex of Europe. It might have been made even more representative of the difference which the American environment is steadily impressing upon the work of Americans who live and paint at home; but notwithstanding its shortcomings in this respect, the exhibition undoubtedly gave evidence that such difference already existed. The evidence was largely of the circumstantial kind, to be gathered not from any patent fact so much as from a collating of various hints of motive and character, and from a comparison of them with those exhibited in the pictures of other countries.

Then one gradually became conscious of more sobriety, earnestness, and simplicity; in fact, of a more obvious conviction, in the American work

than in that of the French section as a whole. The Americans did not seem to be painting in obedience to some vogue, still less with the purpose of creating one; they were not thrashing around for motives which should electrify, by shock or thrill, and prove a brief sensation; nor, on the other hand, did they seem to be bent upon exhibiting the particular advantages of this or that method of technique. Their work for the most part was unassuming and straightforward, penetrated with realism and often tempered with poetic feeling; not less suggestive of the true painterlike way of conceiving the subject because it was executed with so little desire to exploit the mere painterlike facility of brush work, and yet showing a sound and advanced acquisition in technique. Indeed, it was in this particular that the American work showed superior to that of Norway, with the fresh, vigorous spirit of which it otherwise had so much in common. These qualities of earnest force, of directly independent vision and strong, straightforward treatment, so conspicuous in Homer’s pictures, drew the foreign critics to a conclusion that this virile personality might be really representative of American art.

And so it is in the sense that it embodies the qualities and point of view for which all our most individual painters are striving, though its power and depth place him above any direct comparison with other painters, unless it be with Homer Martin. Like the latter, his art has grown out of and into the circumstances of his environment, the most reasonable and fertile way of growth both in plant life and in the life of man. As a boy at Cambridge, Mass., he led the true boy’s life, interested in animals, fond of fishing, observant also of the character and forms of nature, early recording his impressions on paper in a long series of methodically careful drawings. So, from the start, he learned to feel things and to see things for himself, and to express them as they affected him. The accident of an advertisement in a local paper landed him in a lithographer’s workshop, where for two years his habits of methodical application were confirmed, leaving him at the end no less earnest and enthusiastic as a student, but determined that henceforth he would bow the neck to no one. After a brief sojourn in a Boston studio, during which he contributed drawings to Harper and Brothers, he came up to New York, refusing an offer to enter the art department of those publishers, but accepting an appointment at the outbreak of the war to represent them at the front. Meanwhile, he had been attending the night school of the National Academy, and taking lessons in painting from Frederic Rondel, a Frenchman, then in considerable repute as a painter.

His contributions to Harper’s Weekly, though somewhat tamely precise in drawing, gave with much spirit the character as well as the episodes of camp life. Subsequently, on his own behalf, he paid two more visits to the Army of the Potomac, during which he put in practice what he had learned of painting, finally producing “Prisoners from the Front.” This picture, shown at the exhibition of the National Academy in 1864, made a profound impression. Popular excitement was at fever heat, so the picture fitted the hour; but it would not have enlisted such an enthusiastic reception if it had not approximated in intensity to the pitch of the people’s feeling. It has, in fact, the elements of a great picture, quite apart from its association with the circumstances of the time: a subject admirably adapted to pictorial representation, explaining itself at once, offering abundant opportunity for characterization, and in its treatment free from any triviality. On the contrary, the painter has felt beyond the limits of the episode itself the profound significance of the struggle in which this was but an eddy, and in the generalization of his theme has imparted to it the character of a type.

It is at this point that the true artist parts company with the mere practitioner, however accomplished. His work is more than of local and temporary interest; it has a savour, at least, of the universal, which keeps its significance from perishing. The savour need not necessarily be serious; it may be, as in Watteau’s case, a distillation of the elegance of life; but with Homer its seriousness was inevitable, his temperament seeming to require a ground-bass of motive, grand and solemn. So when he occupies himself with character pictures, drawn from country life, they are comparatively trivial. He cannot, like Millet or Israels, discover the fundamental note of humanity beneath the individual. That note may be solemn enough, but it is not big enough in a forceful way to awake his imagination. His pictures of this genre are shrewdly studied and reasonably good in characterization; but, being detached from any background of big intention, their interest is merely local, and they are not done with that ease and style which might secure them technical distinction. But while waiting for the fountain of his motive to be again moved, how commendable it is that he did not set to work to repeat his success of the “Prisoners from the Front,” as a smaller man would have been tempted to do!

At length, however, he finds again the fundamental motive which he needs, this time in the inspiration of the ocean. Off and on for many years he has led the life of a recluse on a spit of land near Scarboro, Maine, whose brown rocks piled in diagonal strata have from time immemorial withstood the onset of the Atlantic combers; an atom of impregnable stability in presence of vastness, solitude, and the perpetual flux of elemental forces. Grounded on his own stalwart individuality, he has kept himself aloof from the truck and scrimage of conventional life and filled his soul with the vastness of nature. How instances of this isolation from the world multiply in the story of art: Watteau retreating into the impenetrability of his own soul; Delacroix and Puvis de Chavannes into their barred studios; Rousseau, Millet, and the rest of their brotherhood into the recesses of the forest. Such isolation seems to be the road to greatness; partly, perhaps, because the man himself must have the elements of greatness in him to wish to do without the constant reinforcement of the world, where men and women prop their shoulders together and make believe that they are standing independently.

Henceforth, then, the ocean supplies the ground-bass of motive in Homer’s art, and the magnitude of its influence begins to inform his work. Deepening in significance, it becomes simpler in expression, and the simplicity is revealed in a fuller synthesis of manner; it grows in comprehension, in force and directness, gaining breadth and freedom of execution, greater purity and subtlety of colour. But he does not at once realize the full significance of the ocean itself. For a time he sees only its secondary significance in relation to the life of the fisherfolk, to whom it is, at once, the means of existence and a perpetual threat of danger. He paints such grandly dramatic pictures as “The Life Line,” “Eight Bells,” “Danger,” “All’s Well,” “Undertow,” “Watching the Tempest,” and “Perils of the Sea”; a series of dramas to which the ocean is the background. How original they are: the subject seen so individually and carving itself out in the artist’s imagination with such incisive force! Moreover, what wholesome breadth in his sympathy! He does not, like Cottet, the eminent painter of the fisherfolk of Brittany, picture the lives of his people as darkened by the pall of an irremediable fatality. He paints them as strong men and women, fronting with strength the vicissitudes of their existence; a point of view entirely akin to his own strong force of character. For here one reaches the tap root of his

From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.