Winslow Homer: Force of Nature, National Gallery show review

The Gulf Stream (1899): an example of ‘intensity and passion’

published 23 September 2022

Few outside his native USA will be familiar with the artist Winslow Homer, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Our national collection contains not a single “significant painting” of his, and if he is known at all on these shores, it is as a “boat painter” whose work is but a footnote in the story of 19th century art.

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Yet in America, Homer (1836-1910) is a totemic figure – and, as this “compelling” exhibition at the National Gallery demonstrates, he is venerated for good reason. A largely self-taught artist, he was a singular painter with “a talent for storytelling” and a knack for injecting his canvases with an overwhelming drama that makes the work of his British contemporaries look fussy and affected by comparison.

The show brings together a stunning selection of his work, from the awe-inspiring seascapes for which he is best known, to paintings depicting the plight of freed slaves in the Bible Belt, to “everyday scenes” of 19th century American life. It gives us a picture of a pioneering artist with a refreshingly ambiguous outlook, a painter who “knew how to trigger interest and keep you guessing”. The aim of this “involving” display is “to enlarge Homer’s transatlantic reputation”, and it deserves to succeed.

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Born into a “well-to-do New England family”, Homer established himself chronicling the Civil War as an illustrator-correspondent for Harper’s Weekly magazine, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Clearly, conflict and danger appealed to him as subject matter: “he loved painting guns, shipwrecks, hunting scenes, freakish waves”. A transformative moment came during a stay in – of all places – a Northumbrian coastal village in 1881-82, when Homer found himself “transfixed by the elemental struggles of its fisherfolk”, and introduced a sense of “keening grandeur” to the maritime paintings he then favoured.

Perhaps the most famous of these is The Gulf Stream (1899), in which a “cartoonish, musclebound” black sailor clings to a boat with a broken mast, beset by swelling waves and some rather unconvincing sharks. “If this is a masterpiece, it’s a faintly ridiculous one.” The same could be said of much else here: the “downright peculiar” Undertow (1886), for instance, sees a group of semi-nude men, “as ripped as classical statuary”, rescuing women from the waves. We do see the odd “strong and memorable” painting here, but for the most part, it’s hard to get too excited about Homer. His work has “too much boyish, adventuresome melodrama, and insufficient mystery”.

His works that deal with the Civil War and the end of slavery are particularly arresting: Sharpshooter (1863), a painting developed from his war sketches, depicts a Union sniper aiming his rifle from a tree, his face “a blur”; A Visit from the Old Mistress (1876) sees an elderly white former slave-owner visiting a black family who once belonged to her. The family stare at their visitor “with much more in their eyes than can ever be said – a lifetime and more of questions and accusations”. For all of Homer’s limitations, this show is an “eye-opening odyssey”.