Surf Near Eastern Point belongs to a group of paintings Winslow Homer produced of the magnificent coast of Prout’s Neck, Maine, where he lived and worked from 1883 until his death in 1910. Homer is celebrated for his iconic seascapes, and major institutions have recognized the Prout’s Neck group as a defining moment in his career. Other examples from the series are located in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Surf Near Eastern Point was included in the major exhibition Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008, and its unusual wide format makes it a particularly compelling and pivotal example in Homer’s artistic development. Gifted to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Cheney Hyde, who had summered in Prout’s Neck since 1888 and were well acquainted with Homer, Surf Near Eastern Point is rooted in the local history and community of the subject it represents. A breathtaking vision of the sublime power of the ocean, Surf Near Eastern Point investigates the primal struggle between man and nature. At the same time, it also represents Homer’s breakthrough as “a radical painter on the brink of modernism” whose work “reveals a contemporary relevance that no other 19th-century American painter can muster,” as New York Times critic Roberta Smith observed in her recent review of the Homer retrospective now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1]

In 1866, Homer traveled to see his two Civil War paintings exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Though he did not name the French avant-garde among his influences, the artists shared mutual interests in serial subject matter, fluid brushwork, and plein-air painting (see, e.g., figs. 1 and 2). Homer returned to Europe for his second and final trip overseas in 1881, when he traveled to London and Cullercoats, a small village on the North Sea. There, he captured the residents’ arduous daily lives along the coast catching and cleaning fish. Homer returned to New York in 1882 and settled the following year in Prout’s Neck.

Many of Homer’s first Prout’s Neck watercolors explore the vicissitudes of the surf and shore, enabled by the portability of his materials, and display an equally varied range of techniques, including transparent and opaque watercolor, subtractive methods, and resists. In Surf Near Eastern Point, an outcropping of richly rendered auburn rock in the lower register grounds the composition. Exuberant waves crest and crash against each other, spraying mist into the air as water gently pools in the rocks below. Homer used blotting to create a vivid texture in the overcast sky above and scraping to define the outline of the rock against the surf. The composition is nearly devoid of human life except for the faint silhouette of a ship bravely endeavoring to cross the horizon—a small detail that reveals the artist’s background as an illustrator. Homer was captivated by the boundless might of the natural world as manifest in the ferocity of the sea and painted numerous catastrophic shipwrecks and heroic rescues (see, e.g., fig. 3). Surf Near Eastern Point offers a novel perspective on his lifelong fascination with the struggle between man and nature via the removal of nearly all narrative compositional elements.

In addition to his interest in the Romanticist ideal of the Sublime in nature, Homer may have been attracted to the subject for its material and conceptual possibilities. The setting at Prout’s Neck contains an array of textures—froth, water, sand, rock, sky—that offer ample opportunity to experiment with various painterly techniques. The minimalist aesthetic created by the reduced palette of warm browns and cool greys is reinforced by the horizontal bands of the compositional structure and the rare panoramic format Homer achieved by trimming the sheet. The opacity of the watercolor Homer used in Surf Near Eastern Point anticipates later developments in the artist’s stylistic evolution. In Cannon Rock (fig. 4), produced over a decade later, for instance, Homer applied thick layers of paint to produce a remarkable impasto in the crest of the wave at the horizon (fig. 5). By essentially removing the element of narrative in Surf Near Eastern Point and other examples in the Prout’s Neck group, Homer was able to focus instead on the formal drama unfolding across the visual field:

“…he became increasingly innovative as a realist and picture builder of bluntly simple compositions, using thick, vigorously handled paint to add power to his forms, and to push his final seascapes to the edge of abstraction. His penchant for dividing canvases edge to edge with stark horizontals (like a field of wheat or a stretch of beach) and especially for emphatic diagonals (whether sloping rock or waves) was admired by the Minimalist Donald Judd looking for artists whose sensibilities he deemed distinctly American, free of European traditions and influences. But Homer’s acute observation of nature—light, atmosphere, weather—his use of wet-on-wet painting and tendency to paint from life qualify him as an Impressionist.”[2]

Surf Near Eastern Point occupies a critical transitional episode in Homer’s artistic development. By approximately 1890, seven years after the work was produced, Homer abandoned narrative subject matter to focus exclusively on the immensity of the sea. His remarkably innovative approach shares creative methods of the European avant-garde and anticipates later developments within abstraction, leaving a lasting legacy on subsequent generations of artists.

[1] Roberta Smith, “Winslow Homer: Radical Impressionist,” The New York Times, April 7, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/arts/design/winslow-homer-painter-metropolitan-museum.html?referringSource=articleShare

[2] Smith, “Winslow Homer: Radical Impressionist”