There’s much more to Winslow Homer than his dramatic seascapes

Until the invention of photography war reportage depended on old-fashioned illustration, and even after that the illustrated press took a while to catch up. Photographic reproduction didn’t work on cheap newsprint, which demanded a crispness of definition that early photography couldn’t provide. So reports on the American Civil War in the new illustrated periodicals aimed at the middle classes continued to rely on wood engraving, and it was as a print designer that the 25-year-old Winslow Homer was sent by Harper’s Weekly to cover the fighting in 1861.

Apprenticed to a commercial lithographer at the age of 19, Homer had no formal training as an artist but he had a nose for the decisive moment that added drama to a reporter’s copy. In Virginia in 1862, with the Army of the Potomac, he fixed on a Yankee sniper up a tree getting a distant enemy in his cross hairs. If the image – captioned ‘The Army of the Potomac – Sharp-shooter on Picket Duty’ – pleased the magazine’s Union-supporting readers, it made the Boston-born artist deeply uncomfortable. Thirty-two years later he confessed in a letter that the experience of looking at a human target through a rifle sight in a Potomac peach orchard struck him ‘as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army’. The following year he worked through his feelings on the subject in what was possibly his first painting in oils.

Growing up in an established New England family, Homer was saddled with a sense of right and wrong that could have been a bar to artistic success, and from early on in his painting career he left his meanings open to interpretation. With its Confederate soldier outlined against the sky the composition of his painting ‘Defiance, Inviting a Shot before Petersburg’ (1864) has all the immediacy of Robert Capa’s famous ‘Falling Solider’ shot during the Spanish Civil War, except that Homer undercuts his soldier’s bravado by painting a black minstrel figure in the trench below accompanying his jig on a banjo – one of the first of many black subjects to appear in his paintings.

In a new biography coinciding with the Winslow Homer retrospective coming to the National Gallery from the Met, William R. Cross traces the artist’s lifelong interest in African-American subjects to the radicalising effect on the citizens of Boston of the notorious 1854 trial of escaped slave Anthony Burns, returned to his southern owner under the Fugitive Slave Act. ‘We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs,’ recorded one solid Boston citizen, ‘& waked up stark mad Abolitionists.’ Whatever the cause, Homer’s unusual focus on black subjects has rescued him from relative obscurity as an American 19th-century anecdotal artist and catapulted him into the BLM age.

There are no Winslow Homers in British public collections, perhaps because his vision is too all-American. Unlike his fellow American realist Thomas Eakins, he didn’t train in Paris; the only time he visited the French capital of the arts was to see two of his own Civil War paintings in the American section of the Exposition Universelle in 1867. He didn’t think a knowledge of art essential to developing an artistic vision; he believed artists ‘should never look at pictures’ but ‘stutter in a language of their own’. But no painter escapes the influence of pictures. Homer’s ‘The Cotton Pickers’ (1876) has clear echoes of Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’, except that the cropping is closer and the women are black.

There’s no sentimentality or condescension in Homer’s treatment of these stoic former field hands turned sharecroppers: he does them the honour of treating them matter-of-factly. The picture sold for $1,500 to an English cotton merchant, who submitted it for exhibition at the Royal Academy two years later. That sale, for a record price for Homer, may have prompted his trip to England in 1881, but there was another more important reason. One of his patrons had recently bought ‘The Slave Ship’ by Turner, and Homer, who came from seafaring stock, was drawn to the sea as a dramatic subject. After visiting the British Museum and painting the Houses of Parliament, he headed north-east to the artists’ colony of Cullercoats on the Northumbrian coast, where he found new models of stoic womanhood in the Tyneside fishwives – ‘stout hardy creatures’ – and of heroic manhood in their seafaring husbands who braved all weathers in ‘The Life Brigade’ (c. 1882) saving the lives of fellow mariners.

On his return to America in 1883, Homer moved into a converted coach house 70ft from the sea on the family estate at Prouts Neck, Maine, where he pursued the theme of man’s battle with the briny, cultivating the not altogether convincing image of a recluse while having lunches delivered by the nearby resort hotel. But the winters were brutal. In December 1886 he wrote to his father regretting that he had bought too small a stove: ‘It is very comfortable within ten feet of it… I wear rubber boots and two pairs of drawers.’

His dramatic action picture of that year, ‘The Undertow’, showing two drowning women rescued by two male bathers, was actually staged on the roof of his New York studio with a friend’s niece standing in for the swooning women and her brother for the brawny rescuers, while a younger brother doused the niece with water. A lifelong bachelor, Homer embraced the wet T-shirt look but was careful to maintain propriety by having his gentlemanly lifeguards avert their gazes. ‘An altogether manly work’, was the verdict of a fellow artist.

Eventually tired of the cold and the rubber boots, Homer took to wintering in the tropics. In 1884 he travelled to the Bahamas to paint watercolour illustrations for a winter travel piece, and he kept returning until the year of his death in 1910. His colourful watercolours of Bahamian life, with their sunlit bungalows, lush tropical gardens and handsome black fishermen, look at first sight like typical tourist views but, as ever with Homer, there is more going on. ‘A Garden in Nassau’ (1885) with its cute little black boy eyeing a coconut palm over a sunlit wall is a charming image but a wall is a wall, sunlit or not, and the coconuts are on the other side.

It was in the Bahamas that Homer sketched the derelict boat circled by sharks that would form the basis of his most iconic painting. Picturing a solitary sailor in a dismasted boat adrift on a stormy sea between a shoal of flying fish and a shiver of sharks, ‘The Gulf Stream’ (1899-1906) is the ultimate image of man at the mercy of nature, and the man is black.

Thirty years later Homer’s painting was hailed by the Harlem Renaissance critic Alain Locke as the picture that ‘broke the cotton-patch and back-porch tradition’ and ‘began the artistic emancipation of the Negro subject in American art’. It must have been the work the artist wanted to be remembered by as it was the only one he had himself photographed in front of, fixing posterity with a challenging glare over the top of his Victorian handlebar moustache.