The ‘Americanness’ of American Art

THE 'AMERICANNESS' OF AMERICAN ART Helen A. Cooper. Winslow Homer Watercolors. New Haven: Yale University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1986. 259 pp. Illus. Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley. The Paintings of Benjamin West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.600pp. Illus. Mark A. Cheetham Winslow Homer's name is synonymous with images of American life in the laternineteenth century: his large oil paintings of the Civil War and his genre picturesof contemporary events brought him fame and remain his best known works, but as Helen Cooper's book makes clear, his numerous watercolours areat least equally important to our assessment of Homer's aesthetic innovationsand merit. Benjamin West's career began almost exactly a century before Horner's and he was if anything even more successful. Because of the importance of the artists, then, these books are significant individually. At the sametime, the differences between West and Homer mirror the cultural growth of the United States and the question of their 'Arnericaness' makes a comparison fruitful. Winslow Homer Watercolors focuses on a famous though still neglected aspect of Homer's art, and Cooper ably takes us through what might be called his alternate career as a watercolourist. Homer's numerous efforts in this medium(about 685 are known) began only in the early 1870s, after he had been a professional artist for almost twenty years. Though he did exhibit and sell watercolours, they were always a somewhat experimental part of his work, less formal and more technically innovative due to the spontaneity inherent in the medium and also because Homer painted them mostly during working vacations at home and abroad. The book is structured as an artistic biography that follows these travels. The truly excellent illustrations (many of which are in 122 Mark A. Cheetham colour) allow the reader to follow Homer's reactions to sites as aesthetically stimulating and various as rural New York State, the Maine coast, the northeastern seaboard of England at Cullercoats, the Caribbean, Florida, and Quebec Province. Boldness marks all of Homer's watercolours, though in varying ways. His first efforts, in the mid-1870s, captured the open, windswept landscape around Gloucester, MA, often through depictions of local children. Homer's vision and its record were so direct that most contemporary critics-used to the high finish and detail of the Pre-Raphaelite style-found his work unfinished. In 1876, Homer exhibited with, and was elected to, the American Society of Painters in Water Colors: his success here, mixed with a recognition of what was marketable and his growing interest in recent French and British art, led Homer to finish his pieces more fully and, in the so-called Houghton Farm series, to portray nostalgic images of rural harmony like Weary of 1878, which shows a wistful shepherdess leaning against a tree, very much in the manner of Millet. As Cooper says, at this point "Homer appropriated a European genre that had little or no reference to American life" (60). Homer extended this interest in foreign models through the early l 880s and his work changed considerably as a result. In 1881-83, he spent twenty months in the English fishing village of Cullercoats on the North Sea. He concentrated increasingly on the design of his watercolours and on the more monumental aspects of nature. The fisherfolk-particularly the women-provided Homer with a touchstone for the strenuous and often tragic relationship between nature and those who live by it. These pictures are perhaps the most overtly allegorical and moralizing in Homer's oeuvre, but the augmented importance of theme remained in the watercolours he later executed in the United States. Old Friends from 1894 is a case in point (see illustration). The picture is nostalgic and may even seem sentimental: the elderly man-a guide in the Adirondacks-looks fondly up at an ancient tree. As Cooper points out, however, Homer is not just playing on the association of age and implied infirmity between the man and tree. As an avid hunter and angler, Homer had been among the first American gentlemen to discover the Adirondacks. By the 1890s when this watercolour was painted, however, this area was already being...