Reading by the Brook

From Prouts Neck, Maine, to the tropics of the Caribbean, Winslow Homer recorded a broad range of outdoor scenes with a personal vision and an honest realism. His own observations of men hunting in the Adirondacks, farm girls herding sheep, and fishermen battling the sea served as inspiration for the images he painted directly from nature in watercolors and oils. Homer’s early experience as an illustrator in his hometown of Boston accounts for the naturalistic rendering and the storytelling quality in many of his scenes. His intuitive handling of the brush, the fine arrangement of the compositions, and a sympathetic portrayal of the subjects, however, take them beyond mere pictorial narratives.

Homer’s only formal training consisted of classes at the National Academy of Design, which he attended periodically from 1859 to 1863. He also made two trips overseas in 1867 and 1881 that exposed him to current trends in European painting. Although Homer never acknowledged any stylistic influences, correlations can be seen in the work of Jules Breton, Eugene Boudin, and Gustave Courbet.

In the late 1870s, Homer produced a series of paintings of young women pursuing various pastimes. Just as in Reading by the Brook, many of these figures were portrayed individually, in a quiet, intimate setting. Here, a seated girl, simply rendered, conveys a mood of quiet contemplation. This work demonstrates Homer’s masterful ability to take commonplace occurrences and transform them into iconic images. To accomplish this effect, Homer refined his vision to include only those aspects that express the essential character of the scene. In this composition he simplified forms organizing the water, grass, and foliage into three horizontal green bands. Dappled effects of light and shade are reduced to short, flat stokes of color, applied in an Impressionist manner. Dashes of brilliant red and white add a spark of life to the shadowed figure, whose face, hidden from view, adds a further element of timelessness to the scene. This canvas was painted at a midpoint in Homer’s career, a time when he was considered by many to be one of the finest genre painters in America.