Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts Goes Big and Goes Winslow Homer in a Splendid Show

The museum displays all of its nearly 50 Homer watercolors, saluting Homer, Boston’s native son, and more than a century of collecting.

T his past weekend, I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to experience what for many will be a once-in-a-lifetime event. For the first time since the late 1870s, the museum is displaying all of its watercolors by Winslow Homer (1836–1910), nearly 50 of them, as well as its dozen or so oil paintings and a selection of Homer drawings and wood engravings from Harper’s Weekly. The exhibition’s called Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor. I’d seen many of the watercolors, one at a time or in small groups, and the paintings are usually on view at the museum, but seeing so much of his work, purely American, rhapsodic and austere, is essential as we head to America’s 250th birthday.

The MFA does more than mount a Homer art exhibition. It has delivered a Yankee drama. Homer is a New Englander through and through, so the sea, rugged, rural life, and the Civil War all figure, but there are also views of Florida and the Bahamas and lots of nostalgia. With inspired, period wall colors called Soot, Stardust, Iron Mountain, and Boreal Forest, and dark lighting appropriate to light-sensitive watercolors, we feel that we’re walking not through a cave or a tomb — Homer’s watercolors are too vibrant — but into another era or dimension.

I like exhibitions that start with peak works, not necessarily the most famous things the artist did but things with wow power — wall power with a touch of surprise and revelation — and the MFA delivers with The Blue Boat, from 1892; Leaping Trout, from 1889; and Woodsman and Fallen Tree, from 1891. They’re close chronologically — Homer did watercolors for 35 years, starting in 1873. The Blue Boat, depicting two hunters paddling through a marshy stream, is iconic Homer, with short, quick brushes of watercolor for the trees, washy greens for ground foliage, and a thick blue passage for water and sky.

We sense how abstract his forms are, which means how modern he is as an artist. Homer is a Hudson River School painter, which means focusing on landscapes and seascapes imbued with the magic that comes from a country as spacious and abundant as ours. He descends from Cole and Church. He’s a 20th-century artist, too, and these three introductory watercolors are on the edge of the new century. All three are chromatically rich and sparkling. The MFA started collecting Homers in the 1890s, often buying things from his dealers hot off his watercolor kit and protecting them from light exposure, as every good museum would do. Private collectors tend to display, which leads to fading. The MFA’s Homer watercolors are pristine.

Leaping Trout presents another facet of Homer’s work that he develops in different ways. He’s a sporty guy, a hunter and a fisherman in the Adirondacks and in Maine, but he’s also a naturalist. He did lots of trout watercolors and conveyed their idiosyncratic iridescence and chromatic glory much as a scientist would. His fish are larger than life because he likes close-ups, but he also suggests they’re supernatural and the stuff of miracles. It’s in a custom-made, gilded, crinkled mat, the kind Homer liked. The Adirondack Guide, from 1894, is another example. His gild mats always shock people, but they enhance a watercolor’s luminosity, and, yes, Gilded Age aesthetics are about more, not less. This ain’t Danish Modern. Woodsman and Fallen Tree places the lone figure as part of nature but also separate from it, another Homer trick. His red and brown clothes contrast with the blue sky but also seem to merge with the orange and yellow fall foliage. Puffs of clouds in the sky seem to merge with puffs of smoke from his pipe.

Early on, the exhibition shows us the tools and properties of watercolor through Homer’s last watercolor box, borrowed from the Portland Museum of Art, showing us his colors, and a box of his brushes, lent by the Bowdoin College museum. Homer worked with cakes of pure color he could mix with water and apply in thin washes, with different colors on top of each other, mixing and transparent, to create exactly the hybrid color he wanted.

Watercolor dries quickly, unlike oil paint, and these two boxes are very portable and perfect for on-the-spot work. Homer felt that his best work was done either directly in contact with the subject or close to it. He painted his watercolors on site, in front of his motif. He did many of his big oil paintings in his studio at Prouts Neck south of Portland in Maine, where the Atlantic and its ocean cliffs were steps away. Homer was a master at blotting pure watercolor on wet paper, layering colors, and applying watercolor on a surface on which he’d already made a pencil skeleton drawing for structure. He was particular about paper, preferring thicker, white sheets he could scrape for added texture. Homer often leaves lots of his white paper uncolored, so it becomes part of the design.

Why, for Homer, watercolors? He did his first ones in 1873, small pictures of children. He wanted to do something different since sales of his big, studio oils had taken a dip, but Homer’s fame in those days was from his Harper’s illustrations, not from his paintings. Harper’s — more precisely Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization — premiered in 1857 and quickly became America’s go-to periodical for news, especially Civil War news, short fiction, fashion, politics, and humor, a mix of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Time magazine, and Life. Thomas Nast became famous as Harper’s cartoonist, but Homer was its most talented image maker.

When looking at any oil painting or watercolor by Homer, it’s best to think about his time as an illustrator. In the 1860s and ’70s, newspaper and magazine illustrators were our version of photojournalists like Robert Capa or Margaret Bourke White or Joe Rosenthal, who snapped the Iwo Jima flag-raising picture I wrote about last month. They’re masters at capturing an instant and translating it from the momentary or mundane to the timeless and universal.

This means they had an instinct for nuances that pack a punch and for nuances that come and go fast. That’s why we read a newspaper, check our news websites, or watch cable news. What we call the news is what’s changed from day to day, minute to minute. At the MFA, a group of Homer’s illustrations show his skill. In one, a gust of wind rustles hoop skirts of fashionable young women walking in Boston. Homer was embedded with a Union Army unit during the Civil War. He showed the excruciating boredom and occasional comedy of camp life. There’s hurry-up-and-wait but also a lumpish private sticking out his tongue for the camp doctor to examine. He shows soldiers on leave and enjoying a reunion with favorite ladies at dances. He never clutters. He zooms in on essentials, giving us the you-are-there look of a documentary.

I would have included Homer’s two most powerful illustrations: The Sharpshooter, an 1863 view of a soldier hiding in a tree, having spotted his target, his finger on the trigger, and Our Watering Places–The Empty Sleeve at Newport, from 1865, depicting a wan veteran sitting in a seaside buggy steered by his clearly terrified wife or fiancée. A triangular flap of uniform, pinned to his side, tells us that he’s an amputee. That flap of fabric clues us to a big, cryptic drama. But there’s enough in the show to make the point that Homer’s knack for both immediacy and mystery led him from illustration, black-and-white and mass-produced, to watercolor.

Watercolor wasn’t exactly a new medium in America. Rather, until the early 1870s, it was a medium for glorified doodles and an established mode of women’s and amateur art. In 1873, the medium grabbed the public eye via a massive watercolor exhibition at the National Academy of Design. Homer thought he’d give watercolor a go, sensing a market opportunity but also itching to get the look of immediacy through color and light, specifically the operation of light on transparent, layered watercolor and the gleam of white paper.

Of Light and Air is an art history show, a connoisseurship show, and a technique show, but the MFA is a woke place, so there’s a fad here and there. His mother, Henrietta, did watercolors and, of course, showing only the work of a dead white male seems unnatural and patriarchal so a few of her modest works are on view, blasted to Boston Harbor by son Winslow’s command and brilliance. Not to curators: If the art is amateur hour, race or gender won’t do anything to make it better.

The MFA borrowed The Dove Cote, from 1873, owned by a private collector, probably because they felt the show needed African-American subject matter. The label for this intricate, charming picture explores Homer’s approach to black masculinity. It has nothing to do with the show, really, but the MFA has so rich and so varied a stash of Homers that Of Light and Air is a miniature retrospective.

In one section, there’s a good mix of Homer’s watercolors, paintings, and drawings of children. After most big wars, there’s a baby boom, and the late 1860s into the ’70s was no exception. These works reveal Homer in transition. His Harper’s illustrations and early oil paintings and watercolors are tight, detailed, and linear, with a direct, matter-of-fact look we’d expect from a picture book story. By the late 1870s, his watercolors are looser. His eye for detail never leaves. In his hunting and fishing watercolors, for example, he’s exacting in his portrayal of the right gear for the task at hand. Otherwise, he aims at color, abstraction, and a spare look befitting a New Englander. Trout Fishing, Lake St. John, Quebec, from 1895, is a feast of grays as Homer dives into a totemic look. He grows to love the dramatic diagonals we see in Hunting Dog Among Dead Trees, from 1894.

A section called Cullercoats is a pivot point for Homer. In 1880 and 1881 he spent months studying life and developing subjects in this tiny fishing village near Newcastle in northeastern England. As the years passed, Homer complained that America had developed and industrialized and homogenized so much that there was no original subject matter left. Hard to believe he felt this way, but, right or wrong, it pushed him to travel to Northumberland to live in a place where, he’d been told, time stood still and the people and practices, if not exactly prehistoric, had missed the Industrial Revolution.

In Cullercoats, he made hundreds of drawings and watercolors. His scenes are spartan, often football-player-size women on cliffs or on a flat, bare beach working in the fish business — they’re as hard as their men, often at sea. His figures are otherworldly, or the stuff of myth, and timeless, too. They’re not ruled by mechanical time but by the cycles of nature governing the moon, the sun, and tides. Before Cullercoats, Homer had spent time in Gloucester, then a rural fishing community, aiming at the look of raw nature balanced against humanity’s endurance, but Gloucester was touristical by then. Putting that aside, his Gloucester harbor scenes during sunsets are both sublime and romantic.

One of the canards about Homer concerns his lifestyle over his last 20 or so years living in Prouts Neck. Old scholarship defined the aging artist as a recluse who focused on his late seascapes, some of which are watercolors, though many are oil paintings that depict agitated waves crashing against rocky cliffs. Today, Prouts Neck seems isolated, but only because it’s a chichi compound of multimillion-dollar old New England houses with wonderful ocean views. The Portland Museum of Art purchased Homer’s small, Shingle Style studio and patch of oceanfront land a few years ago for $10 million.

But Homer was hardly a recluse. Though he never married, he had tons of friends, and Prouts Neck in his day was an elite summer resort with a fancy hotel that brought his meals to him. During the winter, he went to Florida, Cuba, or the Bahamas for holidays. Some of his Caribbean watercolors are on view toward the end of the exhibition. The MFA mixes oil paintings with watercolors in most of the galleries, gradually revealing to us how Homer understood the virtues and deficits in both. Oil paintings such as The Fog Warning, from 1885, a four-footer with a big and grand protagonist, is among the scenes of drama and danger he did in the mid-1880s. Many were of women rescued from drowning or, here, a fisherman at risk. He’s rowing his boat, with a good catch, toward the mother ship that’s taking him back home, but fog is on the march. Will he make it before he and his ship lose sight of each other?

His watercolors don’t have the look or themes of an epic. They don’t invite narrative. They tend to be about observation, ambiance, technique, and color. The Sponge Diver, from 1898 or 1899, shows a shirtless, black Bahamian set against vibrant azure and turquoise water. He certainly couldn’t get contrasts like that in Maine.

I was delighted to see the exhibition video’s star, the artist James Prosek, one of my favorites. In his mid-40s now, he became famous when he was a junior at Yale for his book on trout, illustrated by his own watercolors. He became the Audubon of fish, though he does birds and critters, too, writes books about nature, and makes documentaries. In the video, he and Judith Walsh, an academic who has written about Homer’s watercolors, discuss Homer’s modern, abstract technique and then take us through his studio at Prouts Neck.

Of Light and Air is both beautiful and powerful and a reminder that the best museums can make a blockbuster from their permanent collection. And among a handful of New England museums — the MFA, the Portland Museum of Art, the Clark in Williamstown, the Addison in Andover, the Worcester Art Museum, the Fogg, and Yale’s art gallery — a treasure trove of Homers are either on display all the time or available for viewing in prints and drawings departments. The exhibition catalogue reprises and deepens the wall texts and gives us gorgeous illustrations and details. The MFA has a new director, Pierre Terjanian. He and the curators have started his rule with a triumph.

Driftwood, from 1909 is Homer’s last painting, a seascape depicting the eternal clash between land and sea. Nearly always, Homer omits people from his late seascapes, preferring raw, unmediated nature, rock and water, but in this picture, he adds a mammoth fallen tree and a fisherman trying to maneuver it, likely so it won’t smash into his dock or his moored boat. It might very well be a fool’s errand. Against a turbulent sea and its wreckage, he doesn’t stand much of a chance. He’s mortal, as was Homer. The sea’s Sturm und Drang are forever.