Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [65]
First apprenticed to a lithographer, Homer became a successful illustrator for popular magazines. His drawings of idyllic farm scenes and girls playing croquet kept him steadily employed. As a Civil War artist, he produced illustrations of camp life. At the age of 27, he began — without instruction — to paint in oils. Homer’s friends thought his total indifference to European art was “almost ludicrous,” but Homer insisted on inventing himself. “If a man wants to be an artist,” he said, “he should never look at paintings.”
Homer, “Snap the Whip,” 1872, MMA, NY. Homer brought a new realism to genre painting, presenting exuberant images of rural America.
CRASHING WAVES AND STORMY SEAS. In the 1880s Homer retreated to Maine where he began to paint the raging sea. In shipwreck paintings like “The Gulf Stream” and “The Life Line,” man-against-the-elements became a recurrent theme. Later Homer dropped human figures from his sea paintings altogether and simply portrayed high winds driving blue-green waves against boulders under gray skies. He sometimes waited days for just the right light, dashing out at midnight to paint moonlight on the waves. His ability to portray harsh, stormy weather, to the point where you can almost feel the icy spray, remains unmatched.
At the age of 38 Homer struck out in a new direction. Watercolors had long been used by artists in preparatory studies, but Homer was the first to display his watercolors as finished works and thereby installed the form as a major medium. His marine watercolors are luminous and brightly colored, with patches of white paper left radiant like the glaring tropical sun. In the hands of other painters, watercolors often looked anemic, but in Homer’s bold style, they had the authority of oils.
WATERCOLOR
Invented by ancient Egyptians and used by Renaissance artist Dürer to tint ink drawings, the watercolor came into its own in the mid-nineteenth century as a vehicle for painting English landscapes. Used before primarily for sketches, the watercolor was finally recognized as a technique with its own potential.
Although most beginning artists start with watercolor because the clean-up and materials (brush, paint box, paper, and water) are simple, it is actually a very demanding medium. Its significant characteristics are the fluidity and transparency of the paint, which allows the white background to show through. Artists who have used watercolor with special skill are Cézanne, Sargent, Dufy, Grosz, Klee, and especially Winslow Homer and John Marin.
Homer, “Sloop, Nassau,” 1899, MMA, NY. Homer was America’s premier marine painter and watercolorist, fascinated by the power and energy of the sea.
EAKINS: THE ANATOMIST. Thomas Eakins (pronounced AY kins; 1844-1916) was such an uncompromising realist that when he decided to paint a crucifixion, he strapped his model to a cross. His first concern, he maintained, whether painting a religious picture or, more commonly, portraits and Philadelphia scenes, was to get the anatomy right.
Eakins approached his profession logically and systematically, mastering the necessary technical skills in progressive stages. To learn anatomy, he dissected cadavers and became so knowledgeable on the subject he lectured to medical students. He plotted out the perspective of his paintings with mathematical precision, laying out the structure in grids by mechanical drawing. He was as straightforward as artists came. “I hate affectation,” he wrote. “I am learning to make solid, heavy work.”
STARK REALISM. Eakins depicts an actual breast-cancer operation by the surgeon Dr. Agnew, who lectures to medical students. Critics considered Eakins’s “anatomy lessons” a “degradation of art” and denounced him as a “butcher” for his graphic portrayals. The Pennsylvania Academy refused to display the painting at its exhibition, but for Eakins, clinical fact made the painting all the more truthful.
Eakins, “The Agnew Clinic,” 1889, University of Pennsylvania,