Was Winslow Homer the greatest American painter of the 19th century? Around 1900, many Americans would have said yes. The reputation of Thomas Eakins stood nowhere near its present zenith, and there was something flashy and slightly suspicious about John Singer Sargent, the other main candidate. And Homer was not only big with the public; he exerted a huge influence on younger painters. Robert Henri and the other realists of the Ashcan School embraced him as a role model--the virile eye, always staring at reality over the pencil. "The big strong thing," said Henri, thinking of Homer's seascapes, "can only be the result of big strong seeing."
Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, John Marin, Marsden Hartley--they all owed Homer something. His images of men, sea and mountain, and especially of women, were asexual, but that only made them more American, and saved them from the whiff of scandal that clung to Eakins. His mastery and fluency--in oil and especially in watercolor, which he was largely responsible for establishing as a serious medium in America--were the envy and secret despair of many an artist. The triumph of modernism after the 1930s, however, put Homer's reputation on the downgrade; he looked like an illustrator, with his jumping trout and scudding catboats. Thirty years ago, anyone rash enough to suggest that he was at least as important an artist as Jackson Pollock would have been laughed to silence.
Not anymore. If there is any single lesson to be learned from the great Homer retrospective that was seen in past months at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and that opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it's that Homer was not just a fine American painter but one of the great realist artists of the 19th century as a whole, comparable in achievement to Manet or Courbet, if not Degas. The show's curators, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, have brought enormous scholarly energy to arguing this on the walls, winnowing Homer's 2,000 or so surviving works to some 180 paintings, watercolors and drawings. The condensation we see is one of the real glories of American art, a sustained celebration of that line of empirical vision that began with John Singleton Copley in the 18th century and passed through Audubon, Eakins and Homer into the early 20th. It also reveals a Homer more complicated, both in his ideas and his symbolism, than most people thought existed. Can you "rediscover" an artist who is this popular? If he's as good as Homer, emphatically yes.