Winslow Homer 1836 - 1910

Jennie Bloodgood, Flushing, New York
Mrs. George A. Sherwood, Southport, Connecticut, circa 1936
Robert B. Sherwood, Southport, Connecticut, by 1946
(M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1947)
Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson, New York, 1958
Joan Whitney Payson, New York (by descent from the above)
By descent in the family to the present owner

New York, Century Association, November 1874, no. 7
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Winslow Homer: A Retrospective Exhibition, November 1958-May 1959, no. 21 (no. 20 in Boston)
Rockland, Maine, William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Winslow Homer, 1836-1910: Oils, Watercolors, Drawings, Wood Engravings, July-September 1970, no. 5
Portland, Maine, Museum of Art, Winslow Homer, April-July 1991

"Art at the Century," (NY) Evening Post, February 3, 1873
"Art at the Century," (NY) Evening Post, November 9, 1874
Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Work of Winslow Homer, New York, 1979, p. 92
Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer, New Haven, Connecticut, 1995, fig. 96, p. 124, illustrated
Lloyd Goodrich and Abigail Booth Gerdts, Record of Works by Winslow Homer, Volume II: 1867 Through 1876, New York, 2005, no. 402, p. 177, illustrated, also illustrated in color p. 470

Winslow Homer has been the subject of as much myth making and speculation as any figure in American art. This is ironic, the price he paid during his lifetime and ever since for so successfully guarding his personal and artistic privacy and thus creating an irresistible void for generations of art historians, critics and patrons to fill with second guessing, supposition, and most recently, psychologizing. Homer's legacy of great art continues to confound those who seek to know him and, by inference, to fully comprehend his art. Reverie was painted in 1872 when Homer was just thirty-four years old and already a well-regarded member of the New York art community.

When Homer came to New York from his native Boston in 1859 he was a twenty-three year old illustrator, burning with ambition for a career as a fine artist. By the time he left for France in 1866, he was well on his way to achieving that goal. In the intervening years, Homer produced a body of oil paintings dealing with aspects of the Civil War that won him acclaim and the coveted status of full academician at the National Academy of Design. He had been voted a member of the prestigious Century Association and was also a member of the Artist's Fund Society, a self-help charitable organization founded to aid indigent artists and their families.

Homer's activities in France are not well documented, thereby constituting one of the alluring opportunities for conjecture about what and whom he might have seen. In one of the very few "approved" texts published during the artist's lifetime, a biographical entry in the list of artists whose works were included in the February 1899 auction of the private collection of Thomas B. Clarke, Homer gave his imprimatur to the following statement: 

He made his first visit to Europe at this time [1866], but his stay was brief, and his experience, while it enlarged his field of subjects, had no perceptible influence on his individuality. He works now, as he did at the beginning, in utter independence of schools and masters. His method is entirely his own. He was a realist, before realism had become a fixed fact in French art, from which it has since been so extensively imported into our own. He painted nature as he saw it – always, however, seeing it with a lively appreciation of all that is picturesque and dramatic. His command of the local color and spirit of a scene is always masterly . . . the impression of actuality which he conveys is equally vivid and penetrating.

Homer remained in France as long as his finances allowed.  For the fourteen years bracketed by his return from France in the fall of 1867 to his trip to England in 1881, he was a New York artist, organizing his life according to a regular and typical regimen. He spent summers traveling to a variety of scenic rural, coastal or mountain locations, most often in the company of fellow artists. In the winter he turned summer sketches into studio oil paintings. When Homer actively took up watercolor painting in the mid 1870's it became a mainstay of his summer practice and proved successful enough eventually to allow him to give up the illustration work that had continued to provide a needed source of income. In 1872, Homer moved to his fourth and final New York studio, a space in the highly desirable Tenth Street Studio Building, the very center of New York artist society. Through the decade of the '70's Homer remained active in artist's affairs. He was elected to the powerful Hanging Committee of the National Academy of Design for the 1873 exhibition season, garnering the most votes of any candidate. In 1873, he won a term on the Council, the Academy's governing body. He also served on the art committee of the Century Association in 1873 and the art committee of the Palette Club in 1874. In 1876, he was elected a member of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors. In 1877, he was a founding member of the Tile Club, a convivial, not to say raucous group of artists whose number included Augustus Saint Gaudens and William Merritt Chase. All the while, Homer keenly sought out the best opportunities for selling his work, through exhibitions, galleries, auctions, open studio evenings and personal connections. Both Homer's maternal and paternal families were business people, although his father was, in this respect, a failure. All the more reason, then, that Winslow Homer would never regard himself a success in his chosen profession until it yielded him a comfortable living.  

If Homer's lifestyle of the 1870's reflected common practice, so did his choice of subjects for oil paintings. After the Civil War, the ascendancy in American art of the Hudson River School waned, its carefully composed landscapes giving way to more "natural" or "poetic" interpretations. At the same time young American artists increasingly sought foreign instruction in France or Germany, while newly rich American art patrons pursued instant cultural cachet through the purchase of European fine and decorative art.  In the late 1860's, then, Homer had faced the same question as the rest of the nation: how to move forward past the traumatic social and political rupture of the Civil War and reinvent an American identity by selectively preserving the best parts of the past to incorporate into a progressive American present. Among the answers, in addition to a continued interest in landscape views, were nostalgic history viewed through the prism of the colonial revival, and genre painting. Homer had a natural point of entry for the latter, already skilled in the creation of scenes of everyday life and vignettes of narrative moments from his extensive career as a book and magazine illustrator. As early as 1865, while he continued to paint Civil War subjects, Homer had also embarked on a series of much lighter-hearted pictures depicting well-dressed young women playing croquet, a newly popular game imported from England. Although Homer exhibited war pictures at the National Academy of Design in 1863, '64 and '65, it was a croquet scene, Croquet Player that he chose to send to the National Academy as the diploma picture required upon election to full academician status.

In the 1870's, then, as America struggled to find a way forward, Homer concentrated on "women, children, African-American life, farming, and the wilderness," (Margaret C.  Conrads, Winslow Homer and the Critics, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, 2001, p. 3), topics not unlike those of his fellow artists seeking to create a shared body of national experience. Conrads notes that Homer turned to "an expanded investigation of images of women, one that would increase through the decade." While Homer's attention to the female figure was part of a general trend among American artists, "as always, he would explore the theme on his own terms.  Increasingly, his subjects moved away from narrative content and turned instead toward suggesting universal experiences found in everyday life." (Conrads, p. 49) This is the context for Homer's creation of Reverie.

It was Homer's practice to explore facets of a theme in all the media in which he worked.  Among his well known series of the 1870's were views of young women at bathing beaches, Gloucester beach and boating scenes,  and idealized images of contemporary rural life, focusing on children in school and at play and young farm folk going about their daily chores or courting. Despite this subject matter, however, Homer painted on the edges of the genre tradition. Early in his career as an oil painter he had systematically begun to excise the small details essential to illustration that enable a viewer to "read" the story in a picture. Homer was a figure painter, exploring thematic and formal strategies through compositions that offered enough information to be readily comprehended, but still left room for a wide variety of interpretation and understanding.   

In July, 1872, The New York Post reported that "Winslow Homer and E. Wood Perry are at Hurley, Ulster County, N.Y., sketching the quaint old Dutch interiors which abound in that neighborhood (as quoted in Cikovsky and Kelly, p. 394 "Chronology"). Hurley, near Kingston, New York, with the Catskill Mountains to the west, and the Hudson River to the east, offered rich painting ground for Enoch Wood Perry, a friend and Studio Building neighbor who specialized in rural genre. The town, about a hundred miles north of New York City, was then and remains a picturesque locale.  Founded by Dutch settlers, its population deliberately cultivated their Dutch character and language into the nineteenth century. Main Street of old Hurley remains notable for its preserved stone houses, over three hundred years old, which have earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places. Descendants of  Dutch settlers still live in the area.

Reverie is one of a series of four canvases that Cikovsky links to Homer's summer of 1872 in Hurley. In her entry for Reverie in the Catalogue Raisonné, Abigail Booth Gerdts explains the complications of the known history of this work. It was first brought to the attention of Dr. Lloyd Goodrich, the original compiler of the Homer catalogue, in 1946, untitled at the time. Goodrich named it descriptively "By the Window." The present name, Reverie, appears to have been attached to the picture around 1958 when the Knoedler Gallery in New York sold the picture to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson. The four related canvases, sharing a "theme of a thoughtful young woman shown in a dark interior juxtaposed with a glimpse of a brilliant out-of-doors scene (Gerdts, vol. II, cat. no. 403, p. 178), are identified as An Open Window (cat. no 401), Reverie (cat. no 402), At the Window (cat. no 403), and Salem (Looking out to Sea) (cat. no. 404). Goodrich believed that Homer posed the same model for all of these pictures, as well as the following year's Morning Glories, (cat. no 426) which is not part of this series. Sorting out the early exhibition history of these related works has been complicated by their similarity in name, subject and composition. Gerdts suggests that Reverie may be the work exhibited at the Century Association in 1874 as A Study.

Nikolai Cikovsky sees, in the four related pictures a Hurley effect, that is, a harkening back to Dutch 17^th century influences. Referring specifically to At the Window, in which the model is seated on a chair, he says,

Homer made several paintings. . . all painted from the same model in the same dress at the same time, which serially investigated complicated pictorial problems of strongly contrasted light and dark, and interior and exterior space.
That those effects were not of purely formal interest to Homer, or rather that what formal interest they possessed was art-historically stimulated, is suggested by their recurrent presence in seventeenth-century Dutch art. . . . The black dress and white shawl of the sitter, characteristic of Dutch seventeenth century costume, make its Dutchness all the greater, as does the turned slat-back great chair in which she sits (Ibid, p. 123).

Of the four canvasses in the series, Reverie offers the fewest narrative clues; no chair, no flowering plants on the windowsill. In Reverie the interior is perfectly plain and empty and there is no sign of movement. Homer offers no diversion for the viewer and no diversion for the young woman to distract her from the view out the window. This view is of a garden painted in shades of bright green with vivid pink and red flowers blooming just the other side of the wide open window. From her vantage point sitting on the windowsill, it seems that the young woman could breach the barrier between interior and exterior should she choose, and touch the blossoms, but Homer gives no hint of any such inclination. If the interior and the girl's dress suggest the sobriety of winter, the garden trumpets spring. The formal consideration in all of this series is, as has been noted, the study of light and dark. Light floods through the window, selectively illuminating portions of the woman's face, neck, lace collar, hands and some of the floor boards of the uncarpeted room. The out of doors, that is the view in the garden, radiates a brightness that makes the contrasting dark space even darker as the eye takes time to adjust.

The costume that the young woman wears recalls 17^th century Dutch dress. Dutch Protestant burghers favored black garments, men and women alike clad soberly in black accented by white collars and cuffs. The collars of the women were typically of starched white linen, fastened at the neck and falling capelet-like to some point at or below the shoulder line.  Frans Hals offers a rendering of this style in its severe simplicity in his group portrait of the Regentesses of the Old People's Home, Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands). There is no reason to believe that Homer, a keen observer of anything and everything to do with art, would have been unaware of the association that the costume of his young woman summons, with its blending of 17^th century and 19^th century elements. Her white collar, made of a soft fabric decorated by multiple courses of ruffles, covers her shoulders shawl fashion, and is held closed at the throat by an oval broach. Its front points fall unevenly on her bosom, the right point noticeably lower than the left. She seems unaware of, or unconcerned by, this asymmetry,  a function of her posture, as she looks out the window over her left shoulder, bringing her left shoulder and arm slightly forward to rest across her right arm at the wrist. At the left wrist is a hint of ruffle. What iconographic significance, if any, this Dutch reference has is an open ended question. There is no doubt; however, that for Homer, as for Manet, Monet, Whistler, Eakins and generations of artists, the rendering of black and white on a canvas presented formal challenges that, once met, announced a mastery of color and color theory.  

In Reverie and its three sister canvases of 1872 Homer addresses the striking contrast between the straight lines and right angles of the interior space and gentle, irregular and asymmetric forms of the human figure and nature. Homer paints the floor and walls as a series of flat planes, some intersecting and some running parallel. The far wall is interrupted by a large vertical rectangular window frame, the bottom and top sashes even so that the window is open to its maximum height. In a subtle use of this geometry, Homer indicates the viewer's position, in front of the scene looking slightly to the left. The position is made evident in the vertical bars of the window mullions which are perceived as pairs, slightly separated because of the viewer's angle of vision. The rigorous angularity of the interior acts to soften the contours of the young woman's figure and also offers a contrast to the jumble of natural forms in the flowers and trees growing outside the window.

Homer revisited similar compositional concerns in a watercolor of 1877, Blackboard, again employing a restricted and subdued palette and again posing a young woman against a background of straight lines, this time running mostly parallel in a horizontal direction. In this schoolroom scene the window is replaced by a horizontal rectangle, a blackboard filled with carefully drawn geometric shapes in chalk. Cikovsky suggests that the scene illustrates an elementary art lesson in progress (Ibid, p. 155).  As in Reverie, the human figure, with its curves and volume and suggestion of motion, contrasts with the flatness, strict geometry and immutability of the room. Ironically, perhaps, the pinafore that the young instructor wears to protect her grey dress from chalk dust is decorated in a woven check pattern, that is to say, a geometric design.

The theme of the open window offering a precisely framed and circumscribed glimpse of a wider world beyond the confines of an interior room reprised in Reverie is an ancient and enduring motif in art, long associated with feelings of longing for freedom and a sense of loss or loneliness. When the person at the window is a young, attractive female, the viewer assumes additionally a soupçon of romance. Again, Homer would have been absolutely aware of this iconography as well as quite determined not to offer any additional hints at narrative. The same topic as portrayed in nineteenth century northern European art has recently been elegantly explored by Sabine Rewald in a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the Nineteenth Century.

This small series of paintings, four in all, stand alone in Homer's oeuvre. Nothing he did before or after refers directly to them, and they are little known. Only At the Window has been permanently in a public collection since 1958.  Relatively small in scale, they are gem-like in execution.  They are the work of an artist who had already made his mark critically, but was still striving mightily to find his own market, his own voice, and to show his mastery of the techniques of fine art. For all his reticence, Homer was absolutely clear in his purpose and his goal. He wanted to be an artist, the best artist he could be. He believed strongly in the power of his own talent and that through application and the honing of this talent he could and would express the truth that he saw in the world.