Review of reviews: Art

Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light

Art Institute of Chicago

Through May 10

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

At first glance, Winslow Homer’s watercolor landscapes won’t strike contemporary viewers as anything special, said Kevin Nance in the Chicago Sun-Times. His vivid pictures of “land, sea, and sky” in New England “now strike us as comfortably traditional, the product of techniques familiar to weekend painters everywhere.” But Homer didn’t just employ such techniques as blotting and scraping to create texture, or spattering to imitate cloud and surf. “He virtually invented them.” The exhibition of Homer’s watercolors at the Art Institute of Chicago—the largest such exhibition in two decades—shows how he introduced a rough, loose style that would be furthered by future American artists Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and John Marin.

This extraordinary show brings together 130 of Homer’s “often ravishing landscapes,” said Alan G. Artner in the Chicago Tribune. The Institute’s curators have included such artifacts as his copy “of a key French book on color theory,” and even his actual brushes and paint boxes. “There are also lines on the floor to get us to view certain pieces from both near and far, as the artist intended.” All these elements shed light on Homer’s creative process: The watercolorist’s life-like results “might appear spontaneous,” but in fact he worked tirelessly in his studio to create naturalistic effects that would seem as if they had been “dashed off out of doors.” Homer’s finest landscapes, concerned as much with “humankind’s struggle against nature” as with nature itself, set the tone for future American landscape artists. But his signal achievement was that he “raised watercolor from a medium of amateurs and specialists to one that the most serious artists could use to express themselves fully.”