{"id":15988,"date":"2025-09-11T13:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T13:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/15988\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T13:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T13:31:09","slug":"winslow-homer-watercolors-in-rare-exhibit-at-bostons-mfa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/15988\/","title":{"rendered":"Winslow Homer Watercolors in rare exhibit at Boston’s MFA"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou will see in the future,\u201d Winslow Homer once wrote, \u201cI will live by my watercolors.\u201d It only takes a moment to see what he meant. Immediate, breathless, and intense, they often feel like stray thoughts captured and committed to paper in the brief moment before they flit away. <\/p>\n

Homer\u2019s thoughts were rarely without gravitas \u2014 the curse of a life lived alongside upheaval and conflict \u2014 and so too, the watercolors, the largest collection of which is owned by the Museum of Fine Arts.<\/p>\n

Homer began his career as a Civil War illustrator, documenting the front lines for such magazines as Harper\u2019s Weekly, and the trauma of that experience colored all he did. In its aftermath, with the country in intense upheaval, watercolor became for him a primary medium for capturing an unstable world in constant flux. <\/p>\n

Full disclosure: I\u2019m an absolute sucker for watercolors \u2014 they feel alive, capricious, and not entirely tameable, a good metaphor for life. And Homer, even more than James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, is the undisputed American master. Unlike his peers, the melancholy of Homer\u2019s work feels like a direct line to the turmoil of his time, from which he never truly escaped. In November, 50 works from the MFA collection will be out in the open for the first time in decades, an occasion not to be missed, nor seen again for a generation. (Watercolors\u2019 fragility puts strict limits on the time they can be exposed to light.) Here, four of the best of what\u2019s to come: <\/p>\n

The Adirondack Guide, 1894 <\/p>\n

This piece, with its fluid stain of rich colors and oppressive sense of nature closing in, is a virtuoso effort at taming the untameable: The dense tangle of forest and shadow seems almost to pulse like a living thing, and the tree, with its drape of tentacle-like limbs, looms in its depths like some rough beast awaiting its prey, the guide afloat in the foreground, to drift a little closer. The threat, for Homer, was real. As the country shifted quickly from rural to urban in the latter 19th century, backwoods guides faced the end of a way of life. There\u2019s a reason the guide here is elderly, an emblem of a dying breed. He\u2019s looking over his shoulder, maybe, because he sees what\u2019s speeding toward him. Pay special attention to the reflection on the water; doing that, with this medium, is the next closest thing to impossible. <\/p>\n

\"WinslowWinslow Homer, “Fisherman’s Family (The Lookout),” 1881. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/p>\n

Fisherman\u2019s Family (The Lookout), 1881<\/p>\n

Homer was born in Boston, grew up in Cambridge, moved to New York, spent time in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and then passed through Gloucester en route to Prout\u2019s Neck in Maine, where he spent the last 25 years of his life in solitude at the sea\u2019s edge. Before that final move, he relocated for more than a year to Cullercoats, a small English fishing village, to further cultivate his connection to the sea. He was moved by the profound threat of everyday life there, as the angry seas and constant storms of the far North Atlantic made anxiety a constant feature. In this picture, on a calm day, an entire family, right down to the toddler, perches on a rocky outcrop, waiting stoically for their father and husband to return to land. Bleak and washed out, the scene\u2019s palette matches the anxious mood. A billow of engine exhaust bulking up in the background from a newfangled ship powered not by sail but engine signals a shift in the fishing industry, from community, village-based enterprise to mass-scale. The anxiety is not just for one man, but change itself, visible on the horizon. <\/p>\n

\"WinslowWinslow Homer, “The Dunes,” 1894.Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/p>\n

The Dunes, 1894<\/p>\n

Worry not \u2014 plenty of dorys and marine scenes await when the show opens in November. For now, let\u2019s stay ashore with this densely-packed scene of the barrier dunes near Prout\u2019s Neck, Maine, the last place Homer called home. This is where he painted his most famous scenes of coastal fury \u2014 \u201cWeatherbeaten,\u201d 1894<\/a>, pounding surf exploding against the granite ledge just outside his door comes to mind \u2014 but he was just as captivated by the lives that clung to those shores. Here, two women are bathed in the hot light of a summer\u2019s day, but above, dark skies gather, with the inky deep of the sea just beyond a protective fold of soft sand. A breeze whips their clothing as they contemplate their next move \u2014 closer to shore, or retreat to safety? Even in summer, the palpable threat of the sea looms. <\/p>\n

\"WinslowWinslow Homer, “The Guide and Woodsman (Adirondacks),” 1889. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/p>\n

The Guide and Woodsman (Adirondacks), 1889<\/p>\n

By the late 1890s, the rugged wilderness of the northernmost Northeast was in the process of a profound shift: Rail lines made tourism to comfortable lodges easier than ever to access for city dwellers, even as the logging industry was expanding its rapacious clearcuts across the region. Homer, a fly fisherman, had taken to crossing the border into Quebec in search of less-touched wilderness, which makes this scene feel like a sincere lament. The bright, high-ceiling gloom of cloud mixes with a pale column of smoke \u2014 whether from a campfire or burn-off from a logging operation, who knows? Centered in the frame, the titular guide turns his gaze from a foreground of gnarled and broken tree trunks and over the ruddy, turned-up soil where a forest recently stood to some unknown point \u2014 searching, maybe, for that paradise lost on a faraway horizon. <\/p>\n

OF LIGHT AND AIR: WINSLOW HOMER IN WATERCOLOR Nov. 2-Jan. 19. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Ave. 617-267-9300, mfa.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com<\/a>. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte<\/a>.<\/p>\n