To John Updike, he was simply “ painting’s Melville.”Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. In 1995, when the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., assembled a magisterial retrospective, Homer was still “America’s greatest and most national painter.” He gave us our best selves: Currier and Ives without the kitsch, modernism with a human face.

After his death in 1910, his husky seafarers and oddly concrete ocean sprays were a bridge between old-fashioned storytelling pictures and the 20th-century preference for expressive form. During his lifetime, he managed-not without strategizing-to be both popular with the hoi polloi and admired by his peers. His very name seemed made for the job, half muscular Greek adventure, half fretful Yankee Calvinism (his parents were inspired by the Congregational pastor Hubbard Winslow). “I am not at all sure that I know what Americanism really is,” the art critic Elisabeth Luther Cary told readers of The New York Times in 1936, “but so the case stands: Americanism really is, and, in art, Winslow Homer is its great exemplar.” There was little disagreement.

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