In January 2006, the Portland Museum of Art acquired Winslow Homer’s studio from the painter’s great-grandnephew. The studio sits above the water on Prouts Neck, a peninsula ten miles south of Portland that separates the northern edge of Saco Bay from Homer’s muse—the rocky, wave-beaten, and occasionally deadly coast of the Atlantic Ocean. During the past six years, with the assistance of architectural historians, engineers, and designers, the museum restored the studio to pristine condition. To celebrate the achievement, this past fall and winter the museum exhibited Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine.

Weatherbeaten features paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings dating from 1883, when Homer moved to Prouts Neck, to 1900, ten years before his death (paintings from Homer’s last decade were unavailable for loan). The exhibition is organized into seven themes identified by wall labels. “The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog” includes illuminating details and diagrams about the painting (1894) of that name, and “New Directions at Prouts Neck” explains how the rugged Maine coast affected Homer’s subject matter by leading him away from the figure. “Weatherbeaten” showcases the seascape (1894) that is the exhibition’s namesake, and “Winslow Homer and Etching” examines the relationship between the artist’s prints, paintings, and entrepreneurialism. “Compass Triptych” focuses on three paintings—On a Lee Shore, Eastern Point, and West Point, Prouts Neck (all from 1900)—that Homer occasionally exhibited together in various combinations. “The Wild Kingdom” features his paintings of animals, and “Late Marines” includes seascapes without figures (which Homer referred to as “marines”).

On the whole, the exhibition succeeds because it references and takes advantage of complementary notions of interiority and exteriority. For instance, the curators (Thomas A. Denenberg and Karen Sherry) make frequent references to Homer’s studio to remind visitors that this painter of seascapes was often holed up inside his atelier, closed off from the vaporous expanse that was his subject. Apparently Homer needed privacy as much as he did open air, and though he often started paintings outdoors, he “put them in shape” indoors (Homer, quoted in the exhibition catalogue, 55). These, though, are the most obvious paradoxes of Homer’s life and work in Maine.

Homer left New York City for Prouts Neck when he was forty-seven, and the common perception that he moved to Maine to face the end of his life in hermetic solitude is not exactly right. In his thoughtful essay for the exhibition catalogue, Denenberg introduces us to a Homer who was “inextricably bound to the conditions of modernity” (9) and shows that his reputation as a recluse was “carefully constructed and embellished by the artist himself” (12). For example, Denenberg illuminates Homer’s “entrepreneurial instincts” (13) and invokes his little-known “puckish sense of humor” (16). Similarly, Elizabeth Johns, in her book on Homer, portrays a man quite capable of contentment. She explains how after arriving in Cullercoats—the fishing village on the northeast coast of England where he spent the year and a half before arriving at Prouts Neck—Homer, embarrassed by remarks about his elegant clothes, shed “his short-tailed coat and high silk hat” and donned “a fisherman’s blue woollen [sic] jersey and a nondescript felt hat.” As he did so, she explains, “an earlier affability blossomed again” (Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 99).

The seafarers Homer encountered in Maine shortly after his arrival similarly influenced perceptions about his persona and art. Stalwart New England fishermen, we are always told, appealed to his innate pragmatism and taciturnity. And the depictions of Maine mariners in charcoals made just after he arrived at Prouts Neck, such as Tense Moments (1884), are particularly attentive to the fishermen’s oilskins, sou’wester hats, and studious navigation. The iconic canvases for which such sketches were made—Taking an Observation (1884), The Fog Warning (1885), and Eight Bells (1886), among them—represent tense moments indeed. To be sure, these paintings exhibit Homer’s gift for unfussy, economical design, but, as with The Gulf Stream (1899, not in the exhibition), they are also a bit histrionic. Compositionally, The Fog Warning hinges on the sightline between the fisherman’s angling skiff and the ship on the evanescing horizon. Today, however, now that the painting has become a dramatis personae in the story of American art, the fisherman’s concentration registers as performative. The scene the painting depicts, a fish story about a man very unlike Homer facing a situation few of us have ever known, is staged. The sublimity in these paintings is contrived—it is more a style than a genuine welling up of existential dread—and they share a certain theatricality with the illustrations of N. C. Wyeth.

Homer’s inward turn and most genuinely expressive paintings—such as Winter Coast (1890), The West Wind (1891), and the thickly impastoed Prouts Neck in Winter (1892)—appeared several years after he moved to Maine. The curators make implicit but interpretive allusions to Homer’s tendency to represent the rugged coast in compositions that reveal his moods and elicit from viewers ruminative, sometimes philosophical, attitudes. To accentuate the saturnine tonalities in Homer’s oils, Denenberg and Sherry chose slate-gray hues for most of the gallery walls, which cast a gloominess over the exhibition. We are in Maine, most often in November it seems, and a long way from the summertime idylls and fair winds evident in Homer’s paintings from the 1870s. In the later seascapes and animal paintings especially, we see that Homer filtered his observations of the Maine coast through a very personal, often morose, and ultimately romantic vision. Denenberg claims that what Homer sought to express in his marines of Prouts Neck was a “sort of legend, a description of natural process, action, and aging. . . . [A] visual poem about time and constancy” (1).

Those navigating the seven themes sequentially arrive at “The Wild Kingdom” and “Late Marines” last, and it is here that Homer’s romantic dialectics are most powerfully manifested. Though Denenberg rightly distances Homer from earlier painters of the Maine coast, such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, who relied on “conventions of the sublime” (1), the marines conjure the Kantian sublime, insofar as they represent nature as an overwhelming force and also as a prompt to turn inward and contemplate the limits of our knowledge about nature. Consider, for instance, Early Morning After a Storm at Sea (1900–02). The breaking waves that roll in from the gray Atlantic impact both the rocky coast and our comprehension of the fortitude required to withstand what crashes upon us. The painting evokes inquiry about what lurks out there and about the ground we stand on.

The oft-reproduced Right and Left (1909) is not in the exhibition, but Wild Geese in Flight (1897) is almost as poignant. It represents three Canadian Geese, oriented along a diagonal line that leads somewhere safe, flying low over a dune. Beneath the steadfast birds, two limp geese lay dead on the sand. Beautifully composed, as so many of Homer’s pictures are, the painting synthesizes the opposing forces of instinctual determination—that of the living and resolute geese, of course, but also of Homer’s talent for making perfectly poised, often unerring compositions—and of nature’s unalterable organicism. Death and decay, and therefore irresolution as well, always haunt even our best designs. And so do they in Fox Hunt (1893), hung at the exhibition’s exit. This stunning painting shows Homer’s ability to inscribe ruin into his poised compositions. It is for this reason, I suspect, that during two viewings of the exhibition, I observed so many visitors making use of the gallery benches. The sitters were not tired—it’s a small exhibition, on the museum’s first floor—and neither were they browsing the catalogues left on some of the benches. These visitors, I imagine, were not sitting because of boredom or any incapacity; rather they had been obliged to ruminate on the entanglement of desire and death that Homer had just shown them. The desire is Homer’s—to compose the wild coast, just so, and make of it a home—and it is also the desire of the desperate fox, which just wants to move on.

Homer’s talent was rare. He painted a very common subject—the New England landscape—in a style and with a profundity all his own. All the more reason, therefore, to wish that the curators had provided some art-historical context for what they claim is Homer’s originality. A few Maine seascapes by earlier artists would have been instructive, for instance. In fact, the museum owns two paintings that, had they been hung in the exhibition, would have provided some compelling contrasts. Fitz Henry Lane’s Castine Harbor (1852), for example, which depicts the placid waters of a crescent-shaped harbor, features a much quainter kind of fishing life on the Maine coast; and William Trost Richards’s Ocean Sunset (1895), a mesmerizing representation of cresting waves, offers a strikingly different view of the Atlantic. Whereas Homer preferred to distill forms and flatten space, Richards favored a more precise technique and dazzling illusionism. Homer renders water with opaque grays and flecks of white, while Richards paints it as glassy and luminous. Homer’s sea is all surface; Richards’s is transparent.

Homer devised such excellent compositions that we often forget to analyze the facture of his paintings. We know that his career as an illustrator during the Civil War instilled in him an impeccable sense of design; that he had a classical eye for restraint and symmetry, which was tinged by Japonisme after he visited Paris in 1866–67 (just when the influence of Japanese prints on French art was taking root); and that he gave to nature a formal harmony. In the exhibition catalogue, a chapter by Erica E. Hirshler entitled “North Atlantic Drift: A Meditation on Winslow Homer and French Painting” makes a convincing case that Homer’s style was affected by “the cult of [Jean-François] Millet” (75). The “two masters,” she writes, “share certain fundamental qualities that transcend simple nostalgia. Chief among them is that element of ‘pent fury’ that coils around the relationship of humankind and nature, pitting hope against the environment, disciplined action against chaos” (82).

She is certainly right, though one could argue just as persuasively that the way Homer applied paint to a canvas evinces “disciplined action against chaos.” Another French painter who comes to mind is Édouard Manet, whose work was on display when Homer was in Paris. What Robert Hughes observed about the French master’s style—that the “ceaseless, intelligent play of flat and round, thick and thin, ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ passages of paint is what gives Manet’s surface its probing liveliness” (“The Most Parisian of Them All,” Time [September 19, 1983]: 112)—also applies to Homer’s style. His Watching the Breakers—A High Sea (1896) shows as much: the “fast” painting evident in the spume of the breaker contrasts with slower rendering, apparent in the domes of snow that cover the rocks. Here, as elsewhere, we see how meditative passages work in tandem with a more energic facture. This is how the sublime works in Homer’s marines: the careful consideration of nature brings one into contact with its explosiveness and with the limits of comprehension. In his designs and in his paint, we see that Homer faces nature but can hardly keep up with its eruptions.

As tempting as the comparison to Manet is, there is, of course, a difference in their work. In his chapter, “‘You Must Wait, and Wait Patiently’: Winslow Homer’s Prouts Neck Marines,” Marc Simpson writes, “In Homer’s work there is . . . a moment that holds the memory of its past and a portent of its future. It feels weighty” (93). Manet, by contrast, preferred a lighter touch and represented fleeting social moments rather than “weighty” philosophical ones. It is the vastness of time, rather than its ephemerality, that is the most sublime element of nature; and so Homer, while certainly not conventional, addresses what is age-old: water and rocks, the dialectics of the here and now and what lies beyond.