‘Winslow Homer and the Poetics Of Place’ Get a Brilliant Showing At the Portland Museum of Art

One of our favorite stories about painting concerns an amateur who, alone on a desolate stretch of coast, was working at a French easel, trying to capture the surf, when he became aware of someone behind him. He turned around and the stranger asked whether the painter would mind whether he watched. The painter had no objection and promptly became lost again in his work. When, an hour later, he turned around, the stranger was gone.

Back at his hotel, the painter put the painting he was working on in his room and went down to dinner in the hotel restaurant, which was empty save for one table, occupied by the stranger who’d been watching him paint. Eventually the stranger approached the painter’s table and asked whether, by any chance, the painter had brought the canvas back to the hotel and, if so, whether he would oblige him by fetching it.

The painter went to his room and returned with the canvas, which he held out to the stranger. The stranger regarded it for some minutes, and then said: “You’ve put in too many waves. Just paint one wave, and you will get a better sense of the sea.” And with that he tipped his hat and departed. The painter put his painting aside, and when the bill came for dinner he asked the maitre d’, “Who was the man who approached my table?”

“He eats here sometimes,” the maitre d’ is supposed to have replied. “It’s a Mister Homer.”

The story may well be apocryphal (the painter whom we recall telling it to us insists he can’t remember it), but no doubt it was inspired by paintings like “Weatherbeaten,” a 28 1/2 by 48 3/8th inch masterpiece in oil of a single wave crashing into Prout’s Neck in Maine, where Winslow Homer lived and painted for a decade. It has pride of place in a jewel of a museum show called “Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place,” which is up at the Portland Museum of Art until September 6. If you are anywhere within driving distance of southern Maine, this show is just not to be missed — the perfect morning or afternoon of a summer day.

The show includes some of Homer’s most beautiful oil paintings and a marvelous selection of wood etchings and watercolors, displayed in a setting where it is easy to linger without being jostled by crowds. The show is up on the centennial of Homer’s death. It’s a time when many of us sense that his attention to the craft of painting — to the underlying drawing, the interplay of value and line, the sudden and surprising use of color, and the criticality of composition — has rarely been at a higher premium.

We heard about the show from the painter John Gibson, himself a master craftsman at the play of light, color, value, and form. Over lunch he was rattling on so rhapsodically about how Homer had captured a leaping trout — and, in a dab of red, the flash of the caster’s fly — that we almost left our guest at the lunch table and dashed into Portland then and there. When we did get to the museum, we found the painting even better than we’d imagined, a reminder of the importance of seeing the actual painting.

Our longest pause was in front of “Windy Day, Cullercoats,” a drawing in graphite and gouache on tan paper that is one of a series of works Homer did on England’s northeast coast in the early 1880s. It is of a woman carrying a basket on the beach, her apron being lifted by the same winds that are catching the skiff behind her. Several other pictures from his time in Cullercoats are up at Portland, the others more fully-colored watercolors of women of the region.

“Long-standing and intimate” is how the Portland Museum itself describes the relationship between the museum and Winslow Homer, who, it notes on its website, exhibited at the Museum in his lifetime. It says that the current show is the first time since 1988 that all of the 28 works in the show have been on view in the museum’s Charles Shipman Payson Building.

It is, in any event, something to see Homer in a museum within an easy drive of some of the motifs that inspired so much of his work. An hour away are the foothills of the White Mountains, where Homer depicted artists sketching on a grassy slope under the kind of skies one can see on many an afternoon. Less than an hour in the other direction is Prout’s Neck itself, where Homer managed to capture the power of the ocean by reducing it to a single wave, without anyone standing behind him to urge him on, save, perhaps, the ghost of Turner.

Mr. Lipsky, a Sunday painter, is editor of the Sun.