Mount Whitney. Albert Bierstadt, 1830-1902
No member of the Hudson River school, probably, imbibed so much of the qualities of the Dusseldorf masters as did Bierstadt. He chose for his big canvases panoramas from impressive scenes in Yellowstone Park and in the Rockies. He attempted to give the illusion of reality to these by a minutely detailed rendition of foreground, while the subject itself, with his favorite lowering clouds and romantic haze, was to produce the desired grandeur. The result made his paintings popular in America of his own time; but today his grandeur seems a little theatrical.
[The Conch Divers. Winslow Homer, 1836-1910]
The Conch Divers. Winslow Homer, 1836-1910
It is rare that an artist uses with equal success both water color and oil. With Winslow Homer one hardly knows which to admire more, his oil paintings or his water colors. His oils are, perhaps, more bare, more elemental than the water colors, but the tones are harsher and often less true. In the winter of 1885-1886, Homer visited the Bahama Islands, where a new world of color was opened to his eyes. The water colors which he made during this and subsequent voyages are among the finest things he ever did. Among these is The Conch Divers: negroes on the deck of a sloop are watching the reappearance of a diver who has just come up alongside with some shells in his hand. The Island of New Providence with its palms is seen in the distance at the right. The composition is admirable; the figures are drawn with great power.
“It is Winslow Homer’s distinction that he was the first American painter to use an American idiom,” writes William Howe Downes. “Not only his subjects, but his manner of treating them; not only his motives, but his point of view; not only his material, but the style and sentiment in which he clothes it, have the stamp of Americanism indelibly impressed upon them.” This spirited statement might be qualified by the observation that it is George Inness and Fuller who express more truly the spirit of American rural life; while it is Homer who expresses the spirit of the frontiersman, the deep-sea fisherman, and all those whose lives bring them face to face with the bare facts of the unmitigated elements.