The Inland Winslow Homer

The best-known paintings of Winslow Homer are those of the blistering Caribbean sun, of angry seas, and of the ruggedness of Maine, where he lived out the last years of his life as a virtual recluse. But in the 1870s, when he was still working and living in Manhattan, his chief inspiration came from summer visits to the countryside--upstate New York, for instance, to the tiny town of Mountainville, 60 miles up the Hudson from the city, where one of the mountains has the fierce-sounding name of Storm King. Last week a nostalgic show of the Mountainville paintings, and others that Homer made in the Adirondacks, was on view at the Storm King Art Center.

The rolling landscape west of the river is as peaceful and hospitable as it was when Homer painted it some 90 years ago. The three-year-old gallery, converted from a large mansion with princely gardens and a commanding view, has only the glimmerings of a collection of its own; but if it can put on more shows like this one, it should become a favorite attraction. This show was organized by Lloyd Goodrich, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the leading authority on Homer. The paintings are mostly in watercolor, a medium of which Homer was a master, although he did not take to it until the advanced age of 37.

"I prefer every time," Homer once said, "a picture composed and painted outdoors. This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness." Homer must have spent just about every daylight hour outdoors, for in one Mountainville summer alone, he turned out 50 watercolors, plus drawings and oils. He painted everything from sheep grazing in a distant field to grizzled guides, husky young trappers, beguiling children and young shepherdesses. Sometimes--no one knows quite why--he dressed his plowmen and shepherdesses in costumes of the 18th century. But for the most part, Homer was faithful to what he saw--a boy and girl climbing over an old stile, a young girl seeking a scrap of shade, a lone woodsman affectionately stroking the bark of a tree, or a guide looking out over an empty lake. Three years after the Mountainville summer, Homer spent a summer in an English fishing village on the North Sea. There, for the first time, he began to see nature in all its aggressiveness. In time, his seas erupted, his mountains became craggy, his people--fishermen, hunters, sailors--creatures in lonely combat with an often cruel environment. The early sweetness gave way to force and drama.

But those earlier paintings by contrast cast a moving spell of innocence and charm--an appealing chapter in the life of an artist whom Goodrich calls "the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor America in his time."

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