60 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
on. The man’s fantastic costume has been
linked with Jonkonnu, a Jamaican holi-
day with African roots that had long
since spread to parts of the South. Grant-
ing slaves a brief moment of relative free-
dom, it was held around Christmas for
decades. But, with the bold promises of
Reconstruction, elements of Jonkonnu
were joined to the national festivities that
seemed at last to belong to everyone:
Homer’s original title was “Sketch—4th
of July in Virginia.”
The dominating figure, once again, is
a woman: this time, a tall, rawboned, in-
tensely determined older woman with a
pipe in her mouth—tobacco was the main
crop in Virginia—who, taking a stitch,
draws a thread through the air with the
powerful gesture of a Fate. This woman
has been through everything and can
carry any load. Yet, as Homer and much
of his audience knew, she is as trapped
as the dreamy young women in the cot-
ton fields, unable to make a life for her-
self or for these shoeless, happily excited
children with their heartbreaking flags.
Cross’s portrayal of Homer, as con-
temporary as the Met’s, emphasizes his
“empathy with Blacks and Native Amer-
icans.” The latter part of the statement
is not untrue, although Homer’s con-
tact with Native Americans was lim-
ited: a Montaukett chief on Long Is-
land whom he met (and painted) in
1874—Cross relates that Homer’s wealthy
uncle swindled the tribe out of land—
and Indigenous guides hired to lead a
fishing trip he took with his older brother
in Quebec, people whose work in mak-
ing canoes he documented and admired.
These paintings have never been well
known, and Cross’s contribution here
is particularly fresh. Homer’s depictions
of African Americans, on the other hand,
were regarded as exceptional as early as
1880, although this aspect of his work
faded from view along with the accepted
rights and humanity of his subjects.
Paintings disappeared, too. “Near An-
dersonville,” originally owned by a New
Jersey woman who’d gone South to teach
in freedmen’s schools, was forgotten
for nearly a century, and emerged from
the woman’s family attic only in the
early nineteen-sixties. Recognized as a
(signed) Homer, but with nothing else
about it known, it was given the title
“Captured Liberators” by an astute dealer
in Civil War artifacts. By this time, how-
ever, the country’s leading Homer scholar
did not believe that Homer would have
given a painting even such a mildly po-
litical title, and soon renamed it “At the
Cabin Door.” It was a pair of scholars
with eyes and minds sharpened by the
civil-rights movement, Peter H. Woodand Marc Simpson, who recovered the
painting’s story and true title and, along
with the art historian Karen C. C. Dal-
ton, set out to reëstablish the impor-
tance of Homer’s African American
subjects, and to explain the artist’s rel-
evance to our times. And so today Cross
comfortably compares “The Cotton
Pickers” to portraits by Kehinde Wiley
and the Met’s show includes, as part of
a “contemporary coda,” several terrific
Kerry James Marshall sketches riffing
on one of Homer’s late sea paintings: a
relaxed and high-living modern Black
family out sailing, boom box and all. No
victims here.W
omen and tempests. The dan-
gers of the sea and the beauty of
the sturdy fisherwomen on the north-
ern coast of England, near Tynemouth,
in the village of Cullercoats, where
Homer, still restless, travelled in 1881,
following in the path of many other
painters, and remained for close to a
year and a half. Tempests and angry
seas and women, over and over. And
then, in 1884, back in the States, he com-
bined them anew in “The Life Line,”
depicting a woman being saved from
shipwreck by a man, the pair suspended
by a pulley just above a crashing sea.
This throbbing tumult of a painting
was a great success on exhibition, its
suggestiveness—the Times noted that
the woman was “a buxom lassie”—
largely subordinated to its heroics. There
has been much discussion of just where
Homer saw this new mode of rescue,
which he painted with exacting care.
Cross notes, too, the work’s “dramatic
truth.” But the frenzied scene also looks
very much like a sexual fantasy run amok,
a Victorian ravishment, with the man’s
face hidden by the woman’s billowing
red scarf, and her water-soaked clothes
outlining every curve and crevice, as she
swoons, unconscious, in his arms. Only
his inability to see her so exposed, and
her unawareness of her exposure, in-
sured the painting’s (and the viewer’s)
hold on propriety.
Expanding on the subject two years
later, this most reserved and subtle
painter achieved a sort of aggrandized
light pornography in “Undertow,” in
which two sculpturally chiselled men
drag two provocatively drenched and
entwined women from the angry surf.“What’s the hot-dog guy going to do?”••