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Homer shows them learning skills (sailing, fishing, farm work) and getting their education in the schoolhouse. Henry James found Homer's "barefoot urchins and little girls in calico sun-bonnets...almost barbarously simple" and "horribly ugly," but conceded that they won you over: Homer "has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier...he has incontestably succeeded." Homer was one of the key figures in whose work Americanness ceased to be an embarrassment. The cultural cringe before Europe vanishes and is replaced by a robust confidence in American experience.
Which is not to say he hadn't learned from Europe. His paintings of children sometimes reach for a rough kind of classical energy. The frieze-line of kids running parallel to the picture plane in Snap the Whip, 1872, brings to mind the dancing putti on Donatello's Cantoria in Florence. He had a knack for inserting distant echoes of the classical into the forms of common life, and doing it so subtly that you're scarcely aware of them at first. Homer went to London in 1881 and then settled in the village of Cullercoats on the coast, near Newcastle. He painted the fisherfolk: the men, massive in their rain-slicked oilskins, and the women mending nets and waiting on shore. The distended shapes of windblown clothes give these already robust female figures a sculptural air: you feel the gale blowing their aprons into spinnakers. Homer had to have been looking at the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum, with their fluent drapery rippling across limbs and torso. Sometimes these shawled women, silhouetted against the scudding gray, have the presence of Greek mourners. At Cullercoats he found a basic image: man (or woman) against the sea, the self in the enormous, indifferent context of nature.
In the spring of 1883, Homer shut down his New York studio and moved to Prout's Neck, a narrow strip of rock on the Maine coast. There he found himself a cottage overlooking the sea--a good place for a man whose four favorite words, a friend recalled, were "Mind your own business." He spent 27 years at Prout's Neck, relieved by excursions to New York and fishing trips to the Caribbean, Florida and the Adirondacks. Its steep, sea-gnawed granite ledges became the emblematic landscape of his finest work. No artist since Turner had painted the sea with such lyric concentration, from the beaming blue transparency of the Caribbean, captured in masterly watercolors, to the sullen beat and topple of gray combers driven by an Atlantic gale on the Maine rocks. Cannon Rock, 1895, with its high horizon line and broad V of incoming waves framed by dark rocks, exactly captures the sensation of standing on an exposed promontory with the sea coming straight at you, like a wall.