Old Man & the Sea

It seemed to the art collector from New York that he had tramped over every inch of the craggy Maine peninsula called Prout's Neck, but he could not find a trace of the famous resident he was looking for. Finally he spotted an old fisherman in rubber boots and battered hat. "I say. my man," he called, "if you tell me where I can find Winslow Homer. I have a quarter for you." "Where's your quarter?" snapped the old fisherman, and the stranger quickly handed one over. The fisherman took it, carefully dropped it into his pocket, and without so much as a thank-you said, "I am Winslow Homer."

He had settled down on Prout's Neck in 1884, and he was to have his home there until his death at 74 in 1910. The place was a lonely, windswept land that Homer inadvertently helped turn into a bustling summer resort. Last week, in a special tribute to Homer on the soth anniversary of his death, the Portland Museum of Art put on an exhibition of a highly personal sort. There were only three of the artist's oils, only eight of his watercolors; but there were plenty of reminders of the man himself. From his nephew's widow came three dolls, one suspended from a garter, that Homer used as models. There were his old watercolor brushes, a newly discovered sketch book, a rumpled storm cap, a fishing net he used as a prop. These were the artist's simple possessions--and for long periods of time, his only companions. "That Duck Pond." To his friends, there was always something of a mystery about why he suddenly quit New York and withdrew to Maine. Some said it was because he wanted to cut down on his drinking; others claimed he was miffed at the critics; Homer himself said it was to escape jury duty. Actually, his father had years before bought a cottage on the peninsula, and Homer fell in love with the place. He liked the reticent natives, who left him alone, and like them, he had little use for outsiders.

He was happiest when he could go out in a storm, "robed head to foot in rubber," and when the ocean calmed down he contemptuously referred to it as "that duck pond." Though he traveled each year, he would stay up in Maine by himself until just before Christmas. The wind howled around him, the temperature dropped to 12 below. But Winslow Homer was happy.

"Not At Home!" "I deny that I am a recluse," he once wrote a friend. "Neither am I an unsociable hog." But when a feature writer wanted his views on art, he testily wrote: "I suppose you think I am . . . interested in art. That is a mistake. I care nothing for art." If a visitor knocked at his door, he would yell, "Mr. Homer is not at home." Gradually, Homer became so isolated that he had to hire a local man to call on him each morning just to make sure he was still alive.

A few oldtimers on Prout's Neck still remember their famous neighbor. They tell of how he raised pink carnations behind his studio, and how, when it was hot, he wore a wet sponge on his head out of a morbid fear of sunstroke. He would slash away with his cane at clumps of elderberries, because he considered the elderberry "weak." His great passion was the sea, which he painted, not as something seen through a dream as did the more mystical Albert Ryder, but as man's restless, churning, ever-changing challenge.

The oldtimers are hazy about one thing in Homer's life: they say he died in Cambridge, Mass., but his biographers disagree. Late in the summer of 1910. it seems, he began to fail. He could barely write, and eventually he went blind. But when his two brothers came to his bedside and suggested he be moved to more comfortable quarters. Homer remained firm. "I will stay in my own house," he said, and there, that September, he died.

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