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

This 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.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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This 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.