Volume 43, Number 4 · February 29, 1996
The Great Prose Painter
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Winslow Homer October 15, 1995-January , 1996 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 21-May 26 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 20-September 2.
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,, Catalog of the exhibition by Nikolai Cikovsky Jr., by Franklin Kelly
National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 420 pp., $60.00; $29.95 (paper)
The Winslow Homer show recently on view at the National Gallery, and soon to open in Boston and New York, consists of more than 240 objects: oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and engravings, all the way down to paintboxes and brushes and well-thumbed manuals of color theory. To look at the whole of it is a distinctly nineteenth-century kind of experience, analogous to reading in consecutive order the complete works of Thomas Hardy, or surveying on foot the headwaters of the Missouri, or taking inventory of Theodore Roosevelt's house at Sagamore Hill. There is little in the way of sudden leaps or eccentric digressions: no fever dreams or mad gambles. Progress is made in steady increments, and one must pay attention at each slight bend in the road.
Review, 5280 words
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