Winslow Homer, Snap the Whip (1872)

(Butler)

Because it seems the quintessential embodiment of the American spirit, this painting is one of Winslow Homer's most discussed and reproduced works. As one of our greatest artists, Homer and his life are justifiably the subject of a voluminous body of scholarly writing. Snap the Whip, dating from just about the mid-point of his life, tells us a good deal about some of the critical transitions in his artistic development at that time. However familiar and appealing such a work seems to us, it delights and informs with each new look we bring to it. One of the reasons it is so well known is that it exists in several versions: a large figure drawing for the central group of boys (1872, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York), a finished oil study (1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art), the final Butler Institute canvas, and another figure drawing believed to be a cartoon (Fig. 1), for the nearly exact replica executed as a wood engraving and published in Harper's Weekly, September 20, 1873 (Fig. 2). In addition, there are a few closely related works also dating from the early seventies, School Time (n.d., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Va.) and Country School (1871, Saint Louis Art Museum). As Homer moved from drawing to study to larger painting, he made a number of compositional adjustments and refinements, a characteristic process for him in his treatment of a subject in different media or scales. For example, there is only one tumbling figure to the left in the Cooper-Hewitt and Metropolitan images, and five instead of four boys in the central grouping. Homer began the oil study by including the background hillside, which he then painted out, possibly to keep some spaciousness in this small format. Clearly, the larger size of the Butler Institute's painting allowed him to maintain the mountain setting, a formal echoing of the curving diagonal line of boys in the foreground.

From his early training as a draftsman and printmaker in Boston and subsequent experience as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly, Homer entered his artistic maturity with a consummate skill for compositional organization and telling detail. Here he fuses in perfect equilibrium the three principal elements of his painting-mountains cape, school building, and figures-both as subject and as design. This tripartite balancing has a further expression in the whip line itself: the three anchoring boys at the right, the four running figures in the middle, and the two flying off at the left. As Jules Prown has shown us, Homer's visual theme is that of interdependence and interconnections, held and broken, among human beings. Painted just as the artist was moving from his own youth into middle age, this, and a number o related images from the mid-1870s, suggests he increasingly had in mind his own sense of relatedness and separateness within family and society. As obviously lighthearted, dynamic, and spontaneous as Snap the Whip appears in both form and content, a number of subtle internal tensions heighten its meaning; the play of stillness and motion, running and falling, stones and flowers, interior and exterior, wilderness and construction, physical and mental. This latter contrast is especially pertinent, for the game is taking Place during a midday break indicated by the shadows of a high sun-from the disciplines of learning inside the schoolhouse behind.

Speculation about the location has proposed Easthampton, Long Island, and upstate New York, where Homer had painted at the beginning of the 1870s. But both the hilly landscape and the sketch for a later schoolteacher picture are more specifically associated with the inland location, though typically Homer generalizes his image beyond the moment. At this time there was nostalgia for the disappearing "little red schoolhouses' contrasted with significant reforms taking place in American education, the new role of the teacher, and changes in the curriculum emerging in the decades after the Civil War.  Homer must have thought more broadly about these matters, for this thematic series of paintings depicted play as well as study, freedom as well as detention, the teacher alone and with students, and the schoolhouse as a classroom, a solitary building, and a backdrop. Indeed, its clean cubic form stands as a central focus of order, proportion, and intellectual clarity within the encircling arms of boys and mountainside.

Along with Mark Twain's writings, Homer's pictorial visions in the 1870s are among America's supreme celebrations of youth and the cult of the "good bad boy" of the time, when humor mixed with serious truths, and play, like work, held risk as well a pleasure. We cannot be certain how much Homer identified with his subjects then, as we know he did in later decades, but the critical issue of aloneness versus community that seems to underlie works like Snap the Whip and Dad's Coming (1873, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) was one that his life and art would face from here on out. Significantly, after Snap the Whip, there would never be another painting of a large and active group of figures in Homer's art.

JOHN WILMERDING (Butler Institute of Art website)

(Metropolitan)

Winslow Homer, Prisoners From the Front (1866)

...all of his Civil War work carries the flavor and conviction of actuality.


Homer's painting made sense, as no other painted image did in the same degree, of the fundamental issues of that conflict. It did so because he discarded the conventional subjects of battle paintings or modes of heroic typification for a prosaic encounter between two (so far as most of his critics were concerned) anonymous figures, and because he framed and explained his subject by devices of psychological and sociological analysis that are counterparts in their modernity to the modernity of the subject they were used to describe and thus peculiarly fitted to its elucidation. Contemporary critics did not use these terms, of course, but they repeatedly commented both upon the psychological relations between the two officers, and the regional and social differences which they so clearly exemplified.

--Cikovsky

Link to essays:
C. Colbert, Winslow Homer's "Prisoners From the Front" (1998)
Nicolai Cikovsky, Winslow Homer's "Prisoners From the Front" (1977)



He was an unusual general, slight of build with a peaceful, boyish face, colorless cheeks without a typical general's beard, and a thin voice. He dressed informally, often wearing a "checked flannel lumberjack shirt"^[1] under an unbuttoned uniform coat. (Wikipedia on Francis Channing Barlow)



...Colonel Theodore Lyman, who happened to be Barlow's classmate
at Harvard (Class of 1855), told of his first encounter
with Barlow in the army: "As we stood under a big
cherry tree, a strange figure approached; he looked like
a highly independent mounted newsboy; he was attired
in a flannel checked shirt; a threadbare pair of trousers,
and an old blue kepi; from his waist hung a big cavalry
sabre....It was General Barlow."

--Cikovsky

Winslow Homer, The Life Line (1884)

 Students of the symbolist movement rarely enjoy the luxury of being able to identify the fixed iconographic sources employed in earlier art; instead they must draw inferences from allusions to traditional emblems that are often veiled or transformed in the quest for a more personal, intimate content. Jules Prown equates the spume that ascends behind the entangled couple in TheLife Line (fig. 9), for example, with aspirations towards immateriality and transubstantiation. Salvation in the spiritual, as well as in the physical, sense results from a collective confrontation with the elements undertaken by both the seaman and those on shore who operate the breeches buoy. 
--

Winslow Homer, Reluctant Modern

Charles Colbert 2003

Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt (1893)

The important picture of the year 1893 was "The Fox Hunt." It has been variously known as the " Fox and Crows" and "Winter." The subject of this work is very novel, and requires a word of explanation as to the fact in natural history of which it is a dramatic illustration. In the depths of winter, when for long intervals the ground is covered with snow in Maine, it has been observed that a flock of halfstarved crows will occasionally have the temerity to attack a fox, relying on their advantage of numbers, the weakened condition of the fox, and the deep snow, which makes it peculiarly difficult for the victim either to defend himself or to escape. This, then, is the curious occurrence that Homer took for the subject of his picture, which is as original and forcible as the rest of his productions. In the snow which covers the foreground, near the shore, a weary and harassed fox is running painfully along, in his vain effort to find a refuge from his approaching foes. Two savage crows already hover nearly over him, ready to strike, and the rest of the hungry flock is seen coming rapidly to the spot from the direction of the shore. The canvas is large enough to permit the representation of a life-size fox, and the reddish color of his coat and brush in the midst of the expanse of white makes an interesting point in the color scheme. The ocean is visible in the distance, and overhead is a dark gray wintry sky, in which there are only two small rifts, allowing a cold silvery light to fall on the water near the left side of the picture. The green surf breaks on the rocks and throws up a cloud of spray. There is something uncommonly impressive and solemn about this stern and frigid landscape, and it seems a fit theatre for the impending catastrophe. The painting of the drifted snow in the foreground is exceedingly interesting in the delicate gradations of the values on the undulating surface, in the delicacy of its color, which is apparently very simple, yet is full of variety. The sky also is one that perhaps no other painter except Homer would have the courage to oppose to such a foreground, or, rather, that few other painters would be able to put in its right place.

Mr. Fowler cites this picture as an example of the fine sense of quantities in space that characterizes so markedly much of Homer's best work. "The disposition of the forceful spots in this rectangle is most happy," he writes. "The strong and daring mass of black offered by the crows in the upper right-hand corner, suggesting an even greater volume to the mass by the partly disappearing wings and the approaching numbers of crows — this black, modified and broken by the reflected light on the feathers and the surface light on the beaks, is further distributed by the accents of dark carried to the ears and left forepaw of the fox with fine judgment and effect. So much for the strong and organic notes of the picture. Nothing could show better control of these forcible accents than the manner in which the artist has chosen to place them on the canvas and then given them cohesion by silhouetting these telling spots of black against a darkened sky, and placing the lighter tonal value  

of the fox against the snow. The space in front of the fox suggests much distance for his apprehensive flight — the very direction of his head and ears unites these two active quantities of the scene."1
William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Hiomer, 1911

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Dapper, small, inquisitive, shrewd, I see his portrait in the furry animal in the wonderful Fox Hunt.  Sometimes Maine winters were so severe that flocks of starving crows attacked foxes, and in Homer's view of the drama, two nightmare black birds (the nightmare of the flying black penis) swoop on a dainty fox encumbered in drifts of white snow.
--Thomas B. Hess. "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Winslow Homer Honey" New York Magazine June 11, 1973
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I found very disturbing Thomas Hess's review of the Winslow Homer Exhibit at the Whitney Museum.  While I don't wish to quarrel with Hess's reasonably plausible (although reductivist and sophomorically Freudian) interpretation of Homer's themes.  I feel it is a pity he allowed his view of the work to blind himself and his readers to its great pictorial beauty.


There is something depressingly cynical about finding "the nightmare of the flying black penis" in Homer's Fox Hunt while ignoring the painting's exquisite color and patterning (clearly influenced by Japanese prints), or in failing even to mention Homer's mastery of watercolor technique.  As for equating Homer with "amateurs and primitives" whose lack of control over their subject matter allows repressed or confused eroticism to surface, is Mr. Hess unfamiliar with Leonardo's St. John the Baptist?  What work of art does not reveal something unintended by its creator? 
Jilly Becker
Brooklyn
--Letter in New York Magazine July 2 1973
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Homer (1836-1910)
imagined nature, now immeasurably dis-
tanced from the world of Emerson, as a
cold and amoral environment of chance
and brutality, devoid of justice, except for
the inescapable rules of force.





Link:
Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics