62 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
is censured for failing to depict the mur-
derous violence of the U.S. war of con-
quest in the Philippines—about which
Immerwahr has written elsewhere with
effectiveness—and a reader might eas-
ily fail to realize that Homer was never
in the Philippines. No matter. An illus-
tration of the violence appeared on the
cover of Life. The artist could have—
should have—painted such a scene. In-
stead, he spent the years when the war
was taking place (1899-1902) making
works so enticing they amounted to “an
invitation to empire.”
A debt is owed to the co-curator
Stephanie L. Herdrich for conceiving
this show. So it is even more perplexing,
in terms of the triumph of presupposi-
tion, when she writes, of the Bahamas
watercolors, “He focused on the quotid-
ian lives of the island’s Black inhabitants
and uncritically acknowledged the rigid
strati6cation of Bahamian society.” Un-
critically? The statement would be per-
fectly accurate were it not for this in-
explicable word, which contradicts the
content of several of the works on the
museum’s walls, and even some of Her-
drich’s descriptions of them. “A Garden
in Nassau,” for example, of 1885, in which
a small Black child stands on a dusty
road, looking up toward a tall, closed gate
in a whitewashed wall, forcefully ex-
cluded from the lush growth of palms
and flowers on the other side. (We know
that Homer originally painted and then
erased two 6gures climbing the wall to
pick a coconut, increasing the poignance
of the lone child.) Or “Native Hut at
Nassau,” of the same year, with a group
of Black children staring from the door-
way of a poor hut in a hardscrabble yard;
Cross, whose perception of the artist’s
intent is more generous, sees him as “eager
to understand the lives they lived within
these houses.” Or “A Wall, Nassau,” of
1898, showing the same sort of white-
washed wall with cultivated plantings
behind it, and jagged shards of glass along
the top to keep the unwanted out. Need-
less to say—or is it?—these images are
not exotic idylls and are far from uncrit-
ical of the racial status quo.
T
hen, there are the sharks. Even the
healthiest islanders, in “Shark
Fishing,” of 1885, take mortal risks in
a rowboat hardly larger than their prey.
The results for some can be seen in the
same year’s “Sharks (The Derelict),” in
which another small if sturdier boat,
now swamped by sharks, is eerily empty
and going over on its side. Homer placed
this image at the climax of his 6rst show
of Caribbean works, in 1885; it was found
so unnerving that it didn’t sell for twenty
years. The culmination of this output,
“The Gulf Stream,” long contemplated
and begun only in 1899—the single oil
based on his time in the Bahamas—also
failed to sell for several years. Homer
said that he knew it was not made to
hang in anybody’s home.
The linchpin of the Met’s show, “The
Gulf Stream” intensi6es the artist’s ra-
cial focus even as it universalizes its sail-
or’s plight. A single Black man, the dra-
ma’s protagonist, is shown bare-chested
and casually majestic—“modelled with
a musculature and physical power,” Alain
Locke wrote in 1936, that “broke the
cotton-patch and back-porch tradition”
and “began the artistic emancipation of
the Negro subject.” But his innate power
is to no avail. He lies across the deck
of a devastated boat, as gape-mouthed
sharks close in; the water nearby is
flecked with blood. A few stalks of sugar-
cane coil across the deck, either a plain
fact of his cargo or a sign of centuries
of slave trade. “I regret very much that
I have painted a picture that requires
any description,” Homer replied with
typical asperity to questions about its
meaning. He also mentioned, though,
the influence of Turner’s painting “Slave
Ship” (originally titled “Slavers Throw-
ing Overboard the Dead and Dying—
Typhoon Coming On”), which Ruskin
had once owned but said he found too
painful to keep.
With the unsold painting returned
to his studio, Homer made changes. The
boat—and presumably the man adrift
in it—became American; we can make
out “Key West” lettered on the stern.
He added a broken section to the hull,
and a grand but ghostly ship, gray and
nearly transparent, on the horizon. Some
speculate that this ship was meant to
supply the hope that people wanted to
see, but that is not how Homer worked—
and rarely how artists work, especially
in old age. It hurts more to know that
Cordelia was almost saved, and that the
ship, pace Auden, had somewhere to
get to and sailed calmly on.
It is no surprise that Homer paintedno self-portraits. There are, however,
some imaginative hints in two of his
most magisterial late works. “Fox Hunt,”
of 1893, is the biggest painting he ever
made: six feet across, it is given over to
a single alert yet weary fox, pursued by
a flock of terrifying crows—a deathly
winged mass—across an expanse of glar-
ing snow. It is winter in Maine; the sea
is visible in the mid-distance, cutting
off the fox’s path. The struggling ani-
mal, legs sinking perilously in the snow,
looks off toward the impassable waters.
Homer signed the painting in a curious
way, giving the letters a rounded weight,
so that his name, too, sinks like an ob-
ject or a creature in the snow, to the very
bar of the capital “H.” In his late 6fties,
he still possessed something of the fox’s
elegance, as well as the ironic wit for the
comparison, and as much wonder at this
empty white world as despair.
The hunched 6gure in “Driftwood,”
painted when the artist was seventy-
three, in 1909, also looks out to sea, in
foul weather. He is unusual simply in
that he exists, a man on Homer’s by
now long unpeopled shore. He is tying
a rope around a fallen, washed-up tree
trunk—“driftwood,” too, seems ironic—
that is far too massive for him to move;
he might better use it to anchor him-
self against the elements. He does not
appear young. There is a real chance of
his being blown off his feet, inundated,
badly hurt. Homer was excited about this
painting, which he took up after suffer-
ing a mild stroke. It was the last work
he completed before his death, the fol-
lowing year. “I have little time for any-
thing,” he warned his younger brother,
excusing himself from Thanksgiving
dinner. “I am painting.”
“Driftwood” has the quality of a de-
votional image. The 6gure, as incon-
spicuous against the waves as the fox
is arresting against the snow, is diffi-
cult even to see, at 6rst. Before him,
the sea is painted with an acute dis-
cernment (deep gray against the nearby
rocks, wild sprays of textured white,
glassy opal and limpid gray beyond)
that was learned by looking hard, for
years, with a depth of commitment
most people reserve for each other. He
braved it, holding fast, to show others
so much they didn’t see—beauty, in-
justice, sheer mystery—his gaze ever
outward and his face turned away.