Stop and Look: Dad’s Coming! by Homer
Homer was a professional artist who wanted to create images that would sell, but he wouldn’t succumb to sentimentality.
This small, highly finished painting emerged directly out of Winslow Homer’s professional practice as a journalist-illustrator. Packing a dramatic scene of action - or as here the excited expectation of action - into a confined space was the stuff of magazine illustration, in America as in England at the same period. The scene is quite tranquil (though suggestively disrupted by the sharp angles of the beached boat) but the title explains to us what the boy and his elder sister and baby brother can see in the panorama of ships on the horizon beyond them.
The life of the fishermen of the Massachusetts coast was the subject of his intense study during this phase of Homer’s career and, interestingly, he sought to discover similar subject matter when he came shortly afterwards to England to live in a fishing community in Northumberland. But his range was far wider than these interests would suggest: as a journalist-artist, he recorded with compassion scenes from the Civil War in the 1860s, and fashionable life in in his native Boston, New York and New England.
A continuing thread is the rural life of both New England and the Southern States, where he often depicted with clear-eyed objectivity both the labour and the leisure of the black working class, newly freed from slavery but still living lives very different from those of the white population. He was always attracted to the activities of children, portraying them as individuals, vigorous young Americans, in their distinctive world of country schools and playgrounds.
Always attracted to the sea, he later painted exhilaratingly free studies of the surf both along the New England Coast and among the islands off Florida. Inspired by the teachings of John Ruskin (who was enormously influential in America), he adopted watercolour as a medium, and developed his own distinctive manner in it, so that by the end of his life his work exemplified a sturdy, thoroughly American realism that reflected his warmly humane response to the multiplicity of life that he witnessed around him.
What comes across most strongly in Homer’s work is his profound sincerity. He was a professional artist who wanted to create images that would sell, but he wouldn’t succumb to the sentimentality that so often pervaded the work of successful dealers in "the spirit of America". He was more concerned with real human beings than with the ideas they might be taken to stand for, and so presents us with a convincing portrait of society as he found it, all the more beautiful for the unadorned, muscular simplicity of his imagery.
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