so, financially and socially. His father,
Charles, a proud man, seems to have
failed in every business venture he tried;
his mother, Henrietta, a gifted water-
color artist, had a wealthy brother who
helped them (however humiliatingly)
get through. Devoutly Christian, the
pair initially attended two different
churches: hers was strongly pro-aboli-
tionist, his strongly against, a position
fundamentally aligned with the eco-
nomic interests of Massachusetts. But
with Winslow’s birth, in 1836, Henri-
etta joined her husband’s church, a move
that seemed to go beyond awakened
wifely duty. Winslow was named for
their preacher, who invoked Scripture
to claim that abolitionists would “fill
the land with violence and blood.”
How the young man managed such
personal and political discord is un-
known. Cross, whose scruples some-
times lead to a Homer-like reticence,
refuses even to ask questions. (Is this
how Homer learned to keep his thoughts
to himself? Or why in his adult life he
stayed away from church?) By the time
he was seventeen, he’d left high school
and set to work in a Boston lithogra-
phy shop. He may already have had
hopes of painting, but hopes became
certain plans six years later, when he
arrived in New York. Here again, Cross
seeks to provide a wider context, and
while the material remains thin, one
is grateful for every scrap that shows
Homer living as a painter among paint-
ers, joining clubs and sharing thoughts
in a downtown vie de bohème filled
with excitement about selling paint-
ings and (more often) worries about
not selling them.
Settling in Greenwich Village for
some twenty years, he rubbed shoul-
ders with such close neighbors—often
with studios in the same building—as
Church and Bierstadt and, most im-
portant, the lesser known Eastman
Johnson, who preceded Homer in treat-
ing African American subjects with
sympathy. It is extraordinary to think
of the human periscope having dinner
with Johnson and John Frederick Ken-
sett at the Waverly Inn, or regularly at-
tending exhibitions. “What I remem-
ber best is the smell of paint,” he recalled
of these years, which extended through
the eighteen-seventies. “I used to love
it in a picture gallery.”
Speculation about why he turned
toward solitude—that is, inevitably,
about his love life—has run the gamut.
Was he homosexual and in hiding? The
fact that there is “no evidence” (as Cross
notes) of a relationship with a specific
man means little, in the absence of ev-
idence of any kind. In his work, the
rendering of the male body lacks the
overt eroticism of Eakins or Sargent
(or, for that matter, of Michelangelo),
but some critics (particularly Thomas
Hess) have perceived it there, and, inany case, almost nothing about Homer
is overt. A photograph of him and a
friend, Albert Kelsey, both rather dan-
dified and evidently close, is hardly ev-
idence, but a nude drawing of Kelsey,
however comic in added details, goes
some way toward justifying specula-
tion. Yet Homer’s conflicts show signs
of being even more complex.
Physically, he was slight and wiry,
elegant in dress and bearing but pre-
maturely balding, and with a large
mustache he seemed to hide behind.
Although he earned critical acclaim as
early as the mid-sixties, sales remained
slow; it was only in 1875 that he was able
to quit illustration work, and far longer
before he began to achieve financial sta-
bility. He was well aware during all these
years that he could not support a wife
and family. Romantic failure was an-
other possible reason for secrecy, and
the pretty women who fill his postwar
canvases have prompted various schol-
ars to guess at which one may have bro-
ken his heart. The best candidate is a
beautiful young artist, Helena de Kay,
whose marriage seems to have disturbed
him. Homer’s cold and mournful por-
trait of her, dressed in black, was pre-
cisely dated “June 3rd 1874,” her wed-
ding day, and intended as a less than
joyous gift. Still, the majority of women
in these paintings are anonymous fig-
ures, purely social, as illustrative of a de-
terminedly sunlit America as his other
postwar subjects: the energetic boys of
“Snap the Whip,” the one-room school-
house of “The Country School,” the
broad green pastures of “Milking Time”
and of a country at peace.
These are still among Homer’s most
beloved works. The genial populism of
such subjects, however, was regarded
with notable loathing by Henry James,
then a working critic. In 1875, he com-
plained about the artist’s “freckled,
straight-haired Yankee urchins, his flat-
breasted maidens, suggestive of a dish
of rural doughnuts and pie, his calico
sun-bonnets, his flannel shirts”—all
the proud provincialism (with a bit of
sexual repugnance thrown in) that
James would flee for Europe, and which
he felt Homer was wasting his enor-
mous talent on. Homer himself had
spent seven or eight months in Paris,
in 1867. But, aside from an affinity for
“He took a walk to clear his head and now there’s nothing there.” Millet’s glowing scenes of noble peas-