Homer Centenary

From Boston and Brooklyn, from Chicago and Worcester, from a dozen private collectors, sheaves of water colors arrived at Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries last week for an exhibition to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the most distinguished U. S. artist the gallery ever sponsored: Winslow Homer. It was a shrewd choice as a memorial exhibition. Greatly honored in his own lifetime, Winslow Homer certainly never thought of himself primarily as a watercolorist. Yet modern critics are generally agreed that the U. S. has produced only three men who could create virile, important work in what is widely regarded as a minor art form: Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, John Marin.

Many of Homer's pictures most admired in his own time are forgotten and ignored today. Typical is the case of Prisoners From the Front, a canvas showing a group of Confederates being brought before a dapper Union officer. Painted and exhibited in 1866, this Homer was loudly hailed as the finest painting produced by the Civil War, is almost unknown today outside the Metropolitan Museum.

Winslow Homer was born in Boston, son of a hardware dealer. When he was 19 he was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer named Bufford, who set him to work designing title pages for sheet music. Lithographer Bufford was a member of Father Homer's volunteer fire company.

Young Homer began submitting drawings to the illustrated papers, which quickly accepted them. He moved to New York in 1859. took his only formal instruction in drawing at the National Academy of Design, studied painting with Frenchman named Frederic Rondel, to whom he went every Saturday night for a month to learn how to lay out a palette. ' his brushes. In 1861 Harper's Weekly him to Washington to make drawings the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, r sent him on the Peninsular Campaign to make war sketches. Harper's readers soon began to look forward to the weekly drawings of loafing sentries, mule skinners, sutlers, cannoneers, "from our special correspondent at the front."

After the Civil War pictures, there followed a series of rural scenes, highly admired by Homer's contemporaries. Then, in 1881, the artist went to England for two summers, began the paintings of fishermen, ships and waves by which he is now best remembered. On his return he joined his family at Prout's Neck, Me., a village which his father was trying to develop as a summer resort. Always chary of company, Winslow Homer now became practically a hermit.

Fishing and hunting were Homer's delight, largely because they enabled him to get away from humanity. On such trips he took along his water colors, did the kind of work that today gives him his greatest critical renown. Fishing off Nassau in the Bahamas in 1885, Homer did one little watercolor sketch which the Chicago Art Institute proudly sent to last week's show (see cut). It showed a Negro in a straw hat and white shirt sprawled on the deck of a dismasted sailboat drifting out to sea. A white-bellied shark circled hungrily about. Artist Homer liked the composition, decided to do it over again in oils. Enlarging his field about three times, he took off the Negro's shirt and hat, doubled his supply of sugar cane, removed some storm clouds from the horizon, inserted a distant bark and a water spout, added two more sharks, called it The Gulf Stream. Today it hangs in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the best known picture Winslow Homer ever did.

When some anxious ladies complained of the "gruesomeness" of The Gulf Stream's subject. Artist Homer wrote to the Knoedler Galleries: "You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate Negro who is now so dazed and parboiled will be rescued and returned to his friends and home, and ever after live happily."

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