An eye for the telling moment

Portland Museum of Art celebrates the centenary of Winslow Homer

August 07, 2010|Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

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The brilliant images in watercolor of fishermen’s wives carrying heavy loads in the English village of Cullercoats are also hard to overlook. Such heft and solidity! Drawing on Millet’s farm laborers, they also anticipate the heroic female workers who would later become a staple of Soviet Socialist Realism. Several superb watercolors of men in canoes on the lakes and rivers of the Adirondacks remind us why Homer is considered the greatest of all American watercolorists.

But — perhaps because “Sharpshooter’’ had predisposed me toward morbid subjects — I found myself drawn to two images involving dead animals. The first, an oil painting called “Wild Geese in Flight,’’ shows three heavy geese struggling to achieve liftoff over shrub-tousled dunes. But the focus of the composition, in the lower foreground, is a tableau of two dead geese, wings splayed, necks curved sinuously on the sand.

It’s unclear if the dead birds have been shot from the sky by an unseen “sharpshooter,’’ or if, instead, they have had an unfortunate encounter with a lighthouse (the picture’s first owner insisted that its original title was “At the Foot of the Lighthouse’’). Either way, it’s a marvelously audacious painting. There’s something unaccountably stirring about the scale and sheer presence of these birds (not unlike the Cullercoats fishermen’s wives). Their feathered torsos and velvety necks feel plump and palpable against the scuzzy brown sky, the tawny sand, and the scraggly low bushes. It’s a painting Gustave Courbet might have envied.

The second image of death is a watercolor from 1891 called “Guide Carrying a Deer.’’ Set in the Adirondacks, it shows a strapping, fresh-faced boy standing with monumental composure near the center of the image, against a backdrop of mountain slopes. He looks off with far-seeing eyes, one boot firmly planted on the stump of a felled tree.

The whole image is rich with detail, with harmonious colors, and with a breathable sense of moist, cool mountain air. There’s something especially wonderful about the way the two deer legs by which the boy grips the dead animal form a slender, undulating line behind him, like a scarf he is in the process of wrapping around his neck.

This, I think, was what Homer did best: make heavy, physically impressive things almost shockingly intimate and close.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.

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