Not just seascapes: Winslow Homer’s rendering of Black humanity

|
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“The Gulf Stream,” which Homer painted in 1899 and reworked in 1906, can be viewed as a scene of man against nature, or as a reference to the plight of formerly enslaved people.
  • Quick Read
  • Deep Read ( 5 Min. )

American painter Winslow Homer lived through turbulent times. He began his career in the 1860s as an illustrator and correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, as the United States was descending into the Civil War. During Reconstruction, when the nation tried (and in many ways failed) to find a path forward, he traveled through the South witnessing the aftermath of slavery.

Although Homer left scant record of his convictions about race, his paintings of Black people show his insistence on investing those images with the same realism that he displayed in capturing white subjects. For him, it was a matter of truth-telling. This aspect of his work stands out within a larger exhibition, “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents,” currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

Why We Wrote This

What happens when a familiar artist is viewed through a new lens? In the case of Winslow Homer, audiences see a determination to portray human beings accurately and fairly, regardless of race.

Other artists of the day, if they painted Black people at all, depicted caricatures from minstrel shows. By contrast, Homer’s work shows individuals going about their work, says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, associate professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania.

“They’re not performing for you,” she adds. “Rather, they’re living their daily lives.” 

People think they know the work of American artist Winslow Homer. His boisterous paintings of the Atlantic coast and of scenes such as barefoot boys playing a game of Snap the Whip are comfortingly familiar to many art lovers. But Homer (1836-1910) also made paintings that challenged viewers, both in his time and now in ours, to wrestle with the effects of racism and inequality. 

“There’s a different Winslow Homer for every age,” says Sylvia Yount, who, along with Stephanie Herdrich, curated the exhibition “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In an interview, the curators explained that they wanted to introduce Homer to the next generation, which involves tying the preoccupations of his day to those of our own. 

The exhibition presents 88 oils and watercolors as proof of Homer’s sociopolitical concerns, hinting at a more profound dimension to his art. The common traits are tension, ambiguity, and, in his paintings of Black figures – which constitute a small but potent aspect of the exhibition – an insistence upon investing those images with the same realism that he displayed in painting white subjects.

Why We Wrote This

What happens when a familiar artist is viewed through a new lens? In the case of Winslow Homer, audiences see a determination to portray human beings accurately and fairly, regardless of race.

Homer began his career in the 1860s as an illustrator and war correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, and the period he lived through was turbulent. The nation broke apart during the Civil War (1861-65) and tried (and in many ways failed) to find a path forward during Reconstruction (1865-77). Although the artist left scant record of his convictions about race, his paintings of Black people are unlike those of his contemporaries. 

Digital Image ©2021 Museum Associates LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY
Early in his career, Homer traveled to the American South, where he painted “The Cotton Pickers” in 1876. His images of Black people avoided racial stereotypes.

His images were “really bold, really different,” says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, associate professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania. In an interview, she explains that before Emancipation, artists had elicited sympathy for enslaved people by portraying them on the auction block, for example. But the market for such work evaporated after the mid-1860s, when, she says, “Very few fine art painters continued to paint Black subjects.” Caricatures derived from minstrel shows appeared in paintings, but “it was really unusual for Homer to stake so much on Black subjects connected to Reconstruction,” Professor Shaw says. 

An early work, “Near Andersonville” (1866), is laden with symbolism. An enslaved Black woman stands at the threshold of a shack, emerging from darkness to confront an unknown future. In the background, Confederate soldiers march Union captives off to a notorious prison camp, Andersonville in Georgia, where nearly 13,000 prisoners of war died under horrific conditions. Ten years later, Homer painted “A Visit From the Old Mistress,” an uncomfortable scene in which three Black women receive their former white enslaver with stoic dignity. 

“Dressing for the Carnival” (1877) demonstrates that Homer “is trying to immerse himself in a scene of Black life that seems authentic,” Professor Shaw says, “not a minstrel show onstage, not a saccharine, Currier and Ives scene of happy slaves dancing beside the river.” She adds, “They’re not performing for you. Rather, they’re living their daily lives.”

When Homer visited the Bahamas in 1885, his palette lightened and brightened. It’s difficult to view his dazzling watercolors, full of edenic tropical foliage and sunny reflections on turquoise water, as anything other than benign. But even here, he suggests an undertow of disharmony. 

“A Garden in Nassau” (1885) implies social stratification and exclusion. A Black child stands outside a wall enclosing a private garden, looking at a coconut palm waving in the breeze. “Homer’s edits to ... the composition really give us insight into the meaning of [the] work and shift the tone,” Ms. Herdrich says. Originally Homer included two Black youths who climbed the wall to snatch coconuts. After Homer deleted them, she says, “there’s a completely different sentiment.” The mood is poignant, with a young child isolated outside a lush garden most likely belonging to a white landowner.

Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Art Resource, NY
Homer painted the 1885 “A Garden in Nassau” on a trip to the Bahamas. In it, he depicts a Black child excluded from the garden of a presumably white landowner.

Homer’s watercolors from the Bahamas exult in scenes of strong Black men on boats in their quotidian labor of diving for sponges, coral, and conchs. Yet the sensuality of the scenes doesn’t negate his eyewitness rendering of slavery’s aftermath. “Homer is not looking at the luxury grounds of his hotel as a tourist,” Ms. Herdrich points out. “He’s exploring the Black settlements of Nassau [and] showing in an aestheticized way the harsh realities of a post-slave economy.”

The culmination of Homer’s two visits to the Bahamas was his masterpiece, “The Gulf Stream” (1899, reworked 1906). Professor Shaw sees the painting of an imperiled but resolute Black man, in a dismasted, rudderless boat surrounded by sharks, as the opposite of Homer’s optimistic early work, “Breezing Up: A Fair Wind” (1873-76). In the latter, white children steer a catboat heeling at a rakish angle. Yet they’re in control of their direction and destiny, “enjoying their mastery over nature,” Professor Shaw says.

The composition of “The Gulf Stream” bristles with symbols related to slavery. In the earlier version, depictions of sugar cane on the deck were minor. By giving them prominence in the latter version, Homer suggests the role of the Gulf Stream in the trafficking of enslaved people and the transportation of the product of their labor, sugar.

As an allegory of relentless nature and humans surrounded by insurmountable forces, the meaning of “The Gulf Stream” is unclear: Is Homer signaling fortitude in the face of adversity, or resignation? “His intention was for its meaning to be uncertain,” Ms. Herdrich says, “and to challenge us.”

“The genius of Homer is his ambiguity,” Ms. Yount says. “That’s what makes his art speak to us today.” 

Ms. Herdrich agrees. “The relevance of the questions Homer asks is foundational and fundamental to our country, and [they] really resonate today,” she says. “We’ll be asking different questions in a different moment, and that’s the mark of a truly compelling artist.”

William Cross, author of a new biography, “Winslow Homer: American Passage,” says in an interview that Homer “told truths that are sometimes painful, but he was unflinching in his examination of who we are.” 

Homer himself, in Cross’ examination, was a man of “many images but few words.” In a rare utterance on his work, Homer scoffed at a critic who praised Homer’s technical bravura, insisting to his dealer in 1902 that the picture in question “is not intended to be ‘beautiful.’ There are certain things (unfortunately for critics) that are stern facts but are worth recording as a matter of history.” 

“Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 31. A smaller version travels to London’s National Gallery as “Winslow Homer: Force of Nature” from Sept. 10, 2022, through Jan. 8, 2023.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Not just seascapes: Winslow Homer’s rendering of Black humanity
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/2022/0607/Not-just-seascapes-Winslow-Homer-s-rendering-of-Black-humanity
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe