In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Winslow Homer in London: A New York Artist Abroad
  • Kenneth Haltman (bio)
Winslow Homer in London: A New York Artist Abroad, by David Tatham; pp. xxi + 123. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010, $24.95.

In this slender, handsome volume's fewer than one hundred pages of text, noted Winslow Homer scholar David Tatham explores the artist's eighteen-month stay in England from March 1881 through November 1882. Tatham focuses not on Homer's time in Cullercoats, a fishing village in Northumberland, to which a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid, but on his briefer periods of residence in the "great British metropolis" (xv). Tatham makes a persuasive case that in London, discontented with his previous successes in New York, Homer fundamentally "remade himself as an artist" by dint of study and visits to collections while he produced and exhibited new work.

In particular, Homer transformed himself as a watercolorist. Indeed, Tatham argues, as he has elsewhere, that Homer's experiments with watercolor techniques in the summer of 1879, which led him definitively to prefer British-style transparent washes to French-style gouache, may have motivated his travel to England in the first place. Moreover, the visit, only his second transatlantic venture, marked a crucial watershed in Homer's career beyond medium or technique. His earlier preference for vernacular genre subjects would turn increasingly to more universal themes; his painting took on a theretofore unseen and even unsuspected dynamic lyricism, a new focus on what Tatham terms "mediumistic expression" that went hand in hand with an elevation of the world of nature—before, mere context for human activities—into magisterial subject (6).

Virtually nothing had been known of Homer's stays in London until 2006, when Tony Harrison identified 80 Newman Street, a boardinghouse owned by professional artists William Rimer and his wife Louisa Serena Rimer, as the painter's address [End Page 372] there. A second archival breakthrough came the following year when conservator Judith Walsh confirmed what scholars had long suspected: at least one visit by Homer to the British Museum where he signed the registry to view an exhibition of drawings. Tatham generously acknowledges and patiently exploits these discoveries through thorough and creative archival research of his own, carried out in a wide variety of collections including those of the relevant municipal and borough archives, the National Maritime Museum, the British Library, Guildhall Library of the City of London, the London Metropolitan Archives, Marylebone Library, the National Art Library, and the National Meteorological Archives.

He manages as a result to reconstruct, somewhat speculatively, but with meticulous care, Homer's professional activities in the city. In tracing the execution of the artist's one known London watercolor, a moodily topographic study of the Houses of Parliament seen from across the Thames, he consulted period survey maps and post office directories to identify the exact vantage from which Homer likely worked (at the end of a wharf used for unloading stone and timber) and climatological returns to determine when he might have done so (most likely Easter Sunday 1881). Working from newspaper announcements and exhibition records, Tatham identifies, discusses, and describes which works by what artists Homer would or could have seen on public view—perhaps most importantly J. M. W. Turner's watercolors and his large oil Dido Building Carthage (1815) at the National Gallery.

The book's chapters are unconventionally though clearly organized. Tatham begins in 1903, two decades after Homer's return home, when Homer responded to an invitation to assess his own career during a rare, retrospective interview he granted John Beatty, director of the Department of Fine Arts at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute, at his home in Prouts Neck. When asked what he considered his most important achievements Homer disregarded his pre-London career entirely, naming only paintings (indeed only oils) completed following his return. Tatham's narrative then moves backward in time to the New York art world of the late 1870s, when Homer's pride in a hard-won success turned to frustration as a result of changing aesthetic tastes and new competition against a backdrop of financial and political crisis. Here Tatham covers old ground with a...

pdf

Share