While emptying the old family domicile, I inherited my father's copy of Engineering Drawing by Thomas E. French, from when he began university studies at sixteen. In the original 1911 preface, French declared:
After a knowledge of the technic of expression, the "penmanship and orthography," the whole energy should be directed toward training in constructive imagination, the perceptive ability which enables one to think in three dimensions, to visualize quickly and accurately, to build up a clear mental image, a requirement absolutely necessary for the designer who is to represent his thoughts on paper.
This returned to my mind on viewing "Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher" at the Portland Museum of Art. The nineteen-year-old Homer served an apprenticeship with the lithographer John Henry Bufford in Boston. But he lamented his "treadmill existence" there and set out on his own after two years. The formative work came with his freelance career, as he cranked out wood engravings of genteel scenes and Civil War tableaux for magazines and sheet-music publishers. In doing so, he arguably received the best possible training available for a nineteenth-century career in American art. As Perugino had Verrocchio for a master, Homer had Ballou's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion and its like.
It's informative to see a display of these prints in the exhibition (they're not in the catalogue), because some of Homer's efforts are stinkers. The Coolest Spot in New England—Summit of Mount Washington, which Harper's Bazaar published in 1870, features four ladies and two gentlemen gazing at the vista. Their bodily proportions defy logic, and their poses are as stiff as drywall. But it constitutes a point on the way of "training in constructive imagination," as French put it so beautifully. With a couple of years under Bufford followed by nearly two decades of labor in the editorial trenches, Homer grew as able as any painter in art history to situate a figure in a setting. That illustration milieu produced no more Homers, but it's impossible to imagine Homer without it.
"Painter, Etcher" shows key paintings alongside related printed images, in the context of a mid- and later-career effort by Homer to establish himself as a fine artist in the psyches of reliable buyers. Homer caught the rise of the Etching Revival, which turned etching into a formidable art industry in Western Europe and the United States. It founded a culture of print collection, perhaps subsidiary to the collection of paintings but no less respectable. The parameters of that market remain in effect today. The exploration of the germane history lends this show a pro-market tone rare in the museums these days, and the depth of Homer scholarship at the PMA makes the institution uniquely qualified to execute on the premise. The exhibition also delves into the materials and methods of etching, an enormous subject full of nuances that are hard to describe to anyone not already familiar with intaglio. Helpfully, the catalogue features a "Glossary of Printmaking Terms."
The typical practice had the artist making prints after a well-received painting, but in Homer's case, it sometimes went the other way. The PMA pairs two works from the collection, an 1862 wood engraving titled The Army of the Potomac—A Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, published in Harper's Weekly in 1862, and a painting with the same subject and composition from the following year. Regarding this work, the catalogue describes Homer as a "designer of wood engravings," implying that he didn't cut the image himself. That stands to reason given the division of labor in nineteenth-century print production. But designing for the process required specific visualization of the image and firsthand knowledge of the medium. Sharpshooter shows a Union sniper in a tree. He has benched a long rifle on a branch in front of him, and he aims through a full-length sight. From the print to the painting, Homer has rectified the proportions of the figure (they may have been stretched for publication), subtly improved the positioning and drawing of the bracing hand, and eliminated a canteen that hung in the earlier version. The print is more informational, but the painting is a better picture, more cohesive, atmospheric, and visually refined. Granted, the painting is in color, but the hues are subordinated to values, evincing much forethought about shape and light before color came into play.
The show displays the paintings Hark! The Lark (1882) from the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Life Line (1884) from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Undertow (1886) from the Clark Art Institute, and Eight Bells (1886) from the Addison Gallery. This would be an extraordinary gathering in itself, but the addition of prints related to them couches the paintings in a story of consideration and reconsideration. Commentary that arose with the Etching Revival praised the medium as liberating. One writer noted that etching is "infinitely freer than any other multiplying process," and that
It is the only graphic process by which an artist can improvise—can put his own thoughts—directly, and with such ease that his most fleeting vision can be fixed and the least idiosyncrasy of his handling be preserved—upon a plate from which many duplicates may be printed.
That was all true, for one side of the dynamic. On the other, the artist sought to capitalize on the warm reception of one of his paintings by producing etchings after it. In that case, etching turned into a laborious craft. He drew, then etched, then inked, then printed. Each stage offered myriad possibilities: techniques of drawing, means of varying the effects of the acid bath, treatments of ink, varieties of paper ranging from Japanese imports to homemade sheepskins. He tweaked details of execution over multiple proofs until the print resonated with the forcefulness of the painting.
The Life Line is a thrilling image in which a rescuer and his charge hang from a pulley over enormous gray swells. She flops unconscious in his arms, her red shawl blowing over his face. We pity her vulnerability. We pity his blinded battle against both of their deaths. In the ensuing prints, particularly a greenish one published in 1887, the dire effect is heightened. The shawl merges with the darkness of the rescuer's silhouette and becomes like a wing on the Angel of Death. The foundering vessel at the left edge of the painting is gone, so that one end of the lifeline may as well be secured to the void. In the painting, the rescuee has enough flush in her cheeks to inspire hope that she's still alive. In the print, one's doubts grow.
In Undertow, the viewer can detect the influence running the opposite way, from etching to painting. The sea and its spray are rendered with the brushiness one associates with late-nineteenth-century painterliness. But Homer could only have chained the four figures together convincingly with a detail-by-detail understanding of how to build the forms in Michelangelesque unison. Indeed, the PMA show includes an etched study for the painting in which Homer worked out the two figures in the middle of the composition. Another etching is a study after the painting, which suggests that the artist remained unsure that he had gotten everything right. These works, taken together, show a life spent pursuing artistic probity.
