(Legend has it that Homer posed his
young models on the roof of his New
York studio building, periodically dous-
ing them with water.) Highly praised
at the time for its “virility” and described
as “an altogether manly work,” this paint-
ing, following on “The Life Line,” seems
rather to betray the artist in crisis on
these very matters.
Could this crisis account for the fact
that Homer’s work came virtually to a
halt in the next few years? He never
went further than a drawing for a wildly
sensual work called “Ship Deck with
Two Women Lashed to the Mast,”
which would have required great pail-
fuls to be brought up to the roof. When
he resumed painting, the sensuality was
becalmed, as in the two women raptly
dancing together, before a moonlit sea,
in the elegiac work “A Summer Night,”
of 1890. But soon even such figures came
to seem superfluous. People on the shore
or on surrounding rocks appeared less
frequently, were painted out, were un-
necessary. The sea alone became his
most insistent subject, the place where
his desires were drowned.
Homer was able to replicate the in-
spiring coastal geography of Northern
England at his family’s newly fashioned
homestead in Maine, on a rocky prom-
ontory called Prouts Neck, where he
spent much of the rest of his life. But
not all of it, despite his preferred image
as a hermit. (His door
knocker was a Medusa
head, and he put out a
sign that read “SNAKES!
SNAKES! MICE!” to keep
people away.) Although
he never returned to Eu-
rope, there were trips to
New York, even after he
gave up his studio there,
and many trips to Bos-
ton—especially, music
lover that he was, to hear concerts.
Prouts Neck was on its way to becom-
ing a summer resort; Homer’s studio,
with a balcony overlooking the sea, was
in hailing distance of an elegant hotel,
whose kitchen would deliver his lunch.
Nevertheless, winters were isolating
and bitter. After Homer’s mother died,
in April, 1884, he assumed the care of
his obstreperous father, and that De-
cember, whether to flee the cold or the
sorrow, the two men vacationed together
in Nassau, in the Bahamas; Homer,
alone, went on to Cuba for a few more
weeks. There were later winter trips to
Florida and to Bermuda. But the Ba-
hamas, he wrote, was special: “the best
place I have ever found.” Although he
returned only once, after his father’s
death, in 1898, the work he did as a result
of these two trips—one major oil paint-
ing and an outpouring of watercolors—
seems ever more important, and it forms
the resplendent yet strangely vexed core
of the Met’s show.
Turquoise waters, bright sun, brown
skin—rendered in a watercolor tech-
nique newly free and vibrant, using the
white of the paper to set off colors al-
ready saturated with light, so that the
images appear to glow from within. The
Met’s selection of these fragile and rarely
shown works suggests not only sum-
mery breezes but also the human warmth
and interest so increasingly absent from
the ocean scenes back home. Yet, to
judge by the catalogue that forms the
permanent record of this show, the
beauty of these works is a significant
problem. Although slavery ended in the
Bahamas in the eighteen-thirties, in
Homer’s era it was a British colony with
a racially brutal economic system, akin
to sharecropping in America. Tourism,
a means of income for the British gov-
ernor, was just gearing up, and Homer,
who published some of these scenes as
illustrations in a “touristic ar-
ticle,” in 1887, is in the dock.
“He seemed entirely com-
fortable with colonialist ste-
reotypes of Caribbean islands
as exotic idylls,” the historian
Daniel Immerwahr writes.
True, he admits, Homer de-
picts hurricanes hitting the
islands, and the works have
“variation and nuance,” but
the weather he shows is too
often bright, the people too consistently
healthy. We see Black men wresting a
living from the beautiful waters, but not
“the harsh economics of colonialism” that
impels them. Nor do we see any “indict-
ment” of “U.S. colonialism,” which did
not in fact exist in the places Homer
knew: the Bahamas remained British
until independence, Bermuda is still a
British territory, and the U.S. takeover
of Cuba followed his visit by some thir-
teen years. Beyond the Atlantic, the artistFEED HOPE.
FEED LOVE.