The meaty exhibit, which celebrates the institute's 50th anniversary, follows two timelines: Homer's, and that of collector Robert Sterling Clark, who purchased his first Homer in 1916, six years after the artist's death, and his last in 1955, the year the Clark Art Institute opened with Clark's holdings as the center of its collection.
He built a mighty Homer collection of impressive breadth, perhaps rivaling only that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Marc Simpson, curator of American art at the Clark, organized the exhibit to show off the collection's range. It boasts significant watercolors and oils from every decade Homer worked, though there are a few holes: Clark never acquired Homer's Civil War paintings or late images of Florida and the Caribbean.
The collector's coups make up for that. Clark pulled off the remarkable pairing of ''West Point, Prout's Neck" with ''Eastern Point" (both 1900), seascapes originally exhibited together by Homer in 1901. The paintings convey the wildness of the vista from Homer's longtime home in Prout's Neck, Maine, and mark the two edges of his half-mile of coast. ''West Point" is warmer and more intimate, with a deep red sunset as a backdrop to an almost-human spray of water leaping from rocks in the foreground. The steelier ''Eastern Point" has two threatening plumes of water smashing against the stony shore.
Homer made art to sell it, yet he apparently also painted for himself. ''Sleigh Ride" (c. 1890-1895) a small, astonishing canvas, verges on abstraction. A sleigh slides over the crest of a hill under a deep night sky, illuminated by a burst of moonlight from behind clouds. Nearly everything is blue except the brown of the sled, a trace of peach in its tracks, and a rider's red scarf. ''Sleigh Ride" captures the midwinter's long, crisp night.
Clark scored another victory in 1950, when he purchased the 1881 watercolor ''Perils of the Sea." It was the source for an 1888 etching of the same name that Clark had acquired in 1941. The artist had taught himself the technique during a boom in the etching market.
