Homer

patron, friend, and admirer. Several pictures of
negro life in Virginia were painted in the late
seventies, notably the "Visit from the Old Mis-
tress," which is now in the National Gallery of
Art, Washington. This work, with four others,
was exhibited at the Paris exposition of 1878.
The summer of 1878 was spent at the Houghton
Farm, Mountainville, N. Y., where the artist
painted a number of excellent watercolors, in-
cluding the "Hillside" and the "Shepherdess,"
which figured in the exhibition of the American
Watercolor Society in 1879. In J88o he went to
Gloucester and Annisquam and brought back
with him another large portfolio of watercolors,
twenty-three of which were in the fourteenth ex-
hibition of the American Watercolor Society.
To the same year belongs the "Camp Fire," an
oil painting of a nocturnal scene in the Adiron-
dacks. This canvas, a sterling example of the
painter's originality, was shown in New York
three times, and at the World's Columbian Ex-
position, Chicago, in 1893.

A new page of his art was revealed in 1881-82,
a page far more serious than any that had gone
before. Homer had found his way to the east
coast of England, where, at Tynemouth, he es-
tablished himself for two seasons and produced
a series of watercolors depicting storms at sea
and shipwrecks, the life of the fisherman, and
the daring deeds of the coastguards, in a man-
ner which combined rare dramatic power, inti-
mate actuality, and beauty of design. To this se-
ries belong those stirring compositions, "Watch-
ing the Tempest," "Perils of the Sea," "The Life
Brigade" and "The Ship's Boat." These and
other equally fine works marked a turning point
in the painter's career. When they were exhibit-
ed in New York and Boston in 1883 and 1884,
they were received with enthusiasm. They
formed a fit prelude to the long line of great
marine pieces that was to follow through more
than twenty years of activity.

After his return from England in 1882, Homer
determined to leave New York and make his
home at Prout's Neck, in the town of Scarboro,
Me. He turned his back on the city for good
in 1884, and from that time to the end of his
life in 1910 he lived on the rocky promon-
tory which his achievements have made famous.
There he built a little cottage studio with a south-
erly view over the Atlantic, and behind it a gar-
den. Near by were the summer cottages of his
two brothers. The place was ideal for the pur-
poses of a marine painter. Here Homer stayed
habitually until the first severe winter weather
arrived, when he departed for Florida, Nassau,
or Bermuda, returning in March or April. There

Homer
were some years when he remained at the shore
all winter long, for the most part in solitude,
though he employed a man to come to him for a
part of the day to attend to the household chores.
Homer did a good deal of his own cooking and
all of the garden work. Besides vegetables, he
raised many old-fashioned perennials. Though
he never seemed to feel the need of company—he
remained single all his life—he was by no means
a hermit. Tales are told of his barring his door
to visitors. No doubt he found it irksome at
times to interrupt his work, but he was under all
circumstances a gentleman. From New York he
had brought in 1884 a number of studies and un-
finished paintings, begun at Tynemouth and at
Atlantic City, N. J. The first of these that he
completed and exhibited was "The Life Line."
This work, shown at the National Academy in
1884, was the most important story-telling pic-
ture that he had made up to that time and had
an immediate popular success.
Homer spent the winter of 1885-86 at Nassau,
Bahamas, and on the southern coast of Cuba.
This was the first of many winter voyages he
made to the tropics, sometimes alone, sometimes
in company with his father and his brother
Charles. In Nassau and Santiago de Cuba he
produced a notable set of watercolors and two or
three oil paintings of importance, among which
were "The Gulf Stream" and "Searchlight, Har-
bor Entrance, Santiago de Cuba," both of them
now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. The first of these depicts a stalwart negro
sailor afloat on a dismasted derelict, at the mercy
of the elements, on the deep blue waters of the
Caribbean. His drifting sloop is followed by
hungry sharks. "The Gulf Stream" has been de-
scribed and discussed, praised and censured, as
much as any picture ever painted in America.
The most emphatic praise came from artists,
critics, and connoisseurs, who were able to ap-
preciate the originality of the design, the beauty
of the color, and the sense of serious import con-
veyed by the work. On the other hand, one writ-
er called the picture a burlesque, condemned its
repulsive subject, suggested that its proper place
was the zoo, and stated that when the work was
first exhibited in Philadelphia it was laughed at.
Another critic remarked that sharks were neither
pretty nor artistic-looking creatures, and that
they gave a touch of grotesque hideousness to the
work. Finally, the unusual interest shown by
the general public was doubtless due in the main
to the story, told in such a dramatic yet objective
manner,—its atmosphere of danger, suspense,
fatefulness, with the antithesis of a background
of wondrous beauty in sea and sky.