American painting and its tradition : as represented by Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer, La Farge, Whistler, Chase, Alexander, Sargent . forget his early point ofview. And at times he does. But he has lapses,and the bias of his early days returns to him. From his Southern trips came the material forThe Gulf Stream done about 1886. Oncemore the painter has grasped the psycholog-ical moment. A shipwrecked, starving negro islying on the deck of a dismasted schooner drift-ing in the Gulf Stream. In the shadowed waterof the foreground sharks are playing, beyondthe boat are whitecaps and running seas,
American painting and its tradition : as represented by Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer, La Farge, Whistler, Chase, Alexander, Sargent . forget his early point ofview. And at times he does. But he has lapses,and the bias of his early days returns to him. From his Southern trips came the material forThe Gulf Stream done about 1886. Oncemore the painter has grasped the psycholog-ical moment. A shipwrecked, starving negro islying on the deck of a dismasted schooner drift-ing in the Gulf Stream. In the shadowed waterof the foreground sharks are playing, beyondthe boat are whitecaps and running seas, inthe distance is the suggestion of a waterspoutunder a blue-gray sky. There is quite a displayof color. It is in the sea and sky, but its breadthis somewhat disturbed by being flecked withwhite in patches. The picture is spotty in thefoam and the clouds, and does not sum up as acomplete harmony. It seems as though colorwere not an integral part of it but somethingbrought in as an afterthought—color added todesign rather than design in color. This is not the case, however, with the verybeautiful Herring Net, done at about the. WINSLOW HOMER 105 same time. It is another open-sea piece withfishermen drawing into a boat a net full ofwriggling fish caught in the meshes. Herring, asthey come out of the water, are brilliant in iri-descent hues, and no doubt that in itself ap-pealed to Homer and was the reason for thepictures existence. The color at once becamethe illustrative motive—became the is no feeling now of color as an after-thought or as playing second part to the menor the sea. The eye goes to the glittering herringat once. You comprehend at a glance that thisis a color scheme per se, and that the gray menand the gray sea are only a ground upon whichthe iridescent hues appear. Whether Homerrealized how beautiful the color was, whetherhe had any emotional feeling about it, or saw anyfine pictorial poetry in it, who shall say ? In lifehe was disposed to deny
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectamerica, bookyear1920
