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Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
High Cliff, Coast of Maine,
1894
Oil on Canvas 76.5 x 97.2cm (30 1/8 x 38 1/4 inches)
National Museum of American Art, Gift of William T. Evans

Winslow Homer was the master portrayer of outdoor life in America in the nineteenth century. He painted summer resorts and farms, the coasts, the forests, the mountains, and the hardy men who inhabited them--sailors, fishermen, and woodsmen--with such a fresh approach and boldness of vision that his work now ranks among the highest achievements in American art.

While man's relationship to nature always held a fascination for Homer, it was the awesome power of the sea that dominated his mature canvases. He spent the last twenty years of his life in remote Prout's Neck, Maine, where he came to know intimately the rocky coastline and its changing moods.

In High Cliff, Homer allows us neither distance nor escape. He provides us with no easy entry into the picture's space. We are thrust into the midst of the drama being enacted before us: the relentless crash of the surf against the implacable rock. Our view is close-up, cropped, and devoid of any superficial details that might compete for attention. The strong diagonal composition and the use of contrasting colors--the muted blue-green water clashing with the dark brown of the rocks--are technical devices that heighten the work's tension. The wet cliff glistening in the light, the threatening waves, and the bursting spray, modeled with broad, robust brushwork, convey the scene's intense energy.

At the top of the cliff small figures stand, dwarfed by the isolation and loneliness of the landscape. Throughout his work Homer pondered the insignificance and transience of man in relation to the eternal forces of nature.

Source: Nora Panzer, American Landscapes: Nineteenth-century Selections (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, n.d.), brochure.

© Smithsonian Institution

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