WEEKLYPRESS.COM · UCREVIEW.COM · OCTOBER 17 • 2012 9


Ship To Shore: Homer’s “Te Life Line” at PMA T


By Dea Adria Mallin Contributing Writer


hink about this: every- one except the Native American arrived on


the shores of the New World by ship, so that along with the adventure, the promise, and the romance of travel on the high seas went fear, if not terror, of the power of the sea.


Disaster and rescue scenes have formed a long tradition in marine painting, and now, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted a superb exhibition called Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and “The Life Line,” focusing of one of Winslow Homer’s greatest works, The Life Line, and set- ting it in the historic context of marine painting in Europe and America, of his own ca- reer, and of notions, romantic or otherwise, of rescue. The exhibition, from September 22 through December 16, has a wide reach and is beauti- fully mounted, ordered, and explained. From seafaring stock on both sides, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) grew up in Bos- ton and Cambridge, MA,


Now, Kathleen A. Foster, The Robert L McNeil, Jr. Senior Curator of American Art at the PMA, has made it a focal point of the exhibition at the Perelman Building, its only venue, gathering 33 works by Homer, complemented by a range of precedents in the shipwreck and romantic rescue genre, including 35 paintings, watercolors, etch- ings, engravings, sketches, and ceramics from mid-17th century to early 20th


century,


including fragile, rarely seen pieces.


Winslow Homer -The Life Line, 1884 - Oil on Canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art. The George W. Elkins colliection


spending much of his life exploring the northeastern coastline. Trained as an il- lustrator, he moved to New York City in 1859 to work for Harper’s Weekly magazine, honing his visual storytell- ing. An artist-correspondent during the Civil War, he then turned to watercolors and oil painting. Moving in 1881 to


England for two years and settling in Cullercoats -- a small fishing village with a long history of fishermen lost at sea -- his work deepened in technique and content. Back in America, he soon settled on the rocky Atlantic coast of Prout’s Neck, Maine. In 1884, Winslow Homer painted The Life Line, and


it marked a turning point in his career. As soon as it was exhibited in New York City, it was celebrated by newspapers as “one of the pictures of the year” and im- mediately sold for $2,500, an impressive sum. It resides today, as it has for ninety years, in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.


The exhibition starts with early Homer and his sunshine-and-contentment connection to the sea. In Clear Sailing, children calmly watch sailboats in an equally calm, sun-drenched harbor. Children and happy young women people Homer’s work at Gloucester (Yachting Girl, 1880), New England beaches, or the Jersey shore. After his first transatlantic crossing, to France, Homer depicted ship life as a sunlit event with fashionable, af- fluent passengers strolling the decks -- unfazed by a bil- lowing sea or the steep tilt of their vessel.


But these were selective truths. In the 17th


century,


marine painting had become a specialty in Holland and Flanders where the wealth of merchant ships and the courage of sailors met with the mighty force of the sea. Represented here is 18th century French artist Claude- Joseph Vernet, who followed the Dutch masters’ lead and set the romantic formula for shipwrecks: ragged forbid- ding cliffs, a pounding surf, and a swirling merger of light and dark and sea and sky, as chaos swallows up ship and sailor and passen- ger.


By the 1880s in North America, with immigrant ships and merchant fleets ar- riving, the New England and New Jersey coastlines were filled with wrecks. Philadel- phians have only to walk along Third near Locust to observe fourth-story wooden structures atop old sea cap- tains’ homes -- not “decks” but “widows’ walks,” look- outs from which stoic wives could search the horizon for husbands who might never come home.


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