Some years ago I found myself in Portland, Maine, with some time to kill. I ended up at the Art Museum, which turned out to have a great collection of Winslow Homer, which made perfect sense because Homer settled in Maine in 1883, and the state’s landscapes and seascapes provided more than enough raw material to stoke his furnace until his death in 1910.

“Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine” (Yale) was published to commemorate an exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, which in turn was mounted to celebrate the restoration of Homer’s studio, a fairly unprepossessing structure that used to be a carriage house.

Homer came of age during the Civil War; afterwards he became part of the great late 19th century surge of American art led by John Singer Sargent. Applauded by critics for his Civil War etchings and paintings, he gradually lost a lot of their esteem because of his increasing tendency to paint very loosely.

Today, of course, it’s obvious that he’s channeling the ecstasy about nature that was energizing the early Impressionists. Appropriately, “Weatherbeaten” focuses on nature in the raw. Homer had no use for picturesque sunsets — he was interested in nor’easters, terrible waves pounding on rocks and desperate rescues at sea.

This taste for the violence of nature was replicated in Homer’s character. He was an aggressive businessman with a local reputation as something of a hermit, and was inhospitable to most of his neighbors. When you take into account the fact that Maine people tend to keep to themselves anyway, Homer must have been something of a misanthrope. Photographs show a slightly built bald man with a handlebar mustache and fierce eyes.

“Weatherbeaten” is a worthwhile tribute to a true American original, who anticipated not just the Impressionists, but artists like George Bellows.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

scrannel: unmelodious; grating on the ears.

Quote Unquote…

“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”

— John Updike