 Well, good afternoon everyone and welcome again to those who were joined us last week and welcome to our newcomers. I want to introduce myself. I'm Pat Parazzini, Director of Alumni Engagement, Regional Chapter Development for Fairfield University. And I am so, so thrilled to be able to bring this presentation to you via Zoom. In my position here at Fairfield, I have the pleasure of working with alumni from across the country. Some of them are on this Zoom today, coordinating with chapter leaders and volunteers to host events that keep alumni connected to and engaged with the university. We have nine regional chapters from Boston to Washington, D.C. alphabetically and from Boston to San Francisco geographically. So I hope to meet you all in person at an event in your local area in the very near future. So before I introduce our esteemed guest presenter, again, if you could all just mute your audio and disable your video, that would be great. And right now I have the great honor and pleasure of introducing Dr. Philip Elizoff. Dr. Philip Elizoff is a professor of visual and performing arts in the College of Arts and Sciences here at Fairfield U. He is also a faculty consultant for the New York Times in education, global blog platform where he curates the weekly arts and visual culture pages. Director and founder of the Open Visions Forum, the Open Minds Institute, founding trustee for the Connecticut Arts Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut, and is an elected member of the Association Internationale Today Critique the Arts Critic Press License Bureau sponsored by UNESCO in Paris. Among his many accomplishments, Philip was the recipient of the CNA Council of International Non-Theatrical Events Golden Eagle Award for Independent and Emerging Media in 1986. Philip was published six books on the lives and methods of classically trained, realist artists in the USA, and because of his expertise, he's often asked by Sotheby's and Christie's to evaluate and appraise 20th century American art. In teaching and believing our class motto, art really matters, Philip's life and work is devoted to opening and expanding the human potential through the visual arts. In a career dedicated to public arts advocacy and the promotion of the art spirit, Philip has had the privilege to assist, promote, and give voice to meritorious artists. At the same time, the discovery of new young and emerging artists is of equal significance. He has curated, promoted, and helped to launch the careers of countless new artists who will become leaders into the future. I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with Philip in the past for alumni college, and I have enjoyed it immensely, and I've learned so much. I give you all Dr. Philip Eliza. Thank you. Okay. You're switching back to me Patricia. Yes. All right. All right. Sorry, somebody was trying to get in. There you are. And then you're in the corner felt. Oh, that's interesting. I only see you. Oh, okay. I only see you. Let's see. All right. I'll let Patricia play. I'll let Patricia play with it. Let's see. Okay. Oh, I see you, Patricia. And you don't. And I see you. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, hi everybody. First of all, I, I hope that everyone is well. You're all safe and well and trying to work through very difficult time. And I want to assure you at the university are our team or faculty, the administration, the staff, everyone has really risen to the to the moment. It's been a very, very difficult time. You know, we're all supposed to be part of this brave new world. And I know you, you probably had the first time you had Easter dinner as a zoom with your 25 relatives. The last six or seven weeks we have been online with our students with with the undergraduates and it is been it has been a process. Online teaching while there's so much so much positive aspect to the connectivity we're having a we're seeing that the students themselves they're they're really pretty much at the end of their wits. I know some of you and I see from the name some of you I've known since the 1970s and 80s 90s. And I can tell you that the the 19 and 20 year old students they're just longing they're aching to get back into this hall and back into Donna room a hall they're just hoping so Patricia you okay. I'm good. Okay. I'm going to try to. Let me see if I can put the double on so that I can at least see what I'm doing okay I see Jerry and Jed on my screen but I'm good. All right. This social distancing and the need for us to be sheltering that's obvious the need the medical crisis, etc. I think there's going to be a bridge over the next six to nine months of what higher education is going to look like. And we're just holding tight. No decisions have been made but I can assure you that I was just on we just finished the semester on Monday, and the, you know, my my first online class was Monday, March 16. And the students were. Oh, gee, this is cool. It's like we're talking to our professor but it's like we're on, you know, Facebook without. The second week and the third week. Now we are about six, seven weeks into this process and the students are just completely beleaguered by this experience and let's hope. Let's hope that we're all back and well and colleges will open and the dormitories will open let's hope for the best but again I do want to thank you for taking time and these busy days. You would think that there's nothing to do but we find ourselves busier than ever. I'm sure you're having that same experience but today we have an opportunity to talk about about America and about some ideas of America in a transition and and what better artists could we use then maybe maybe one of the top artists of America of the 19th century, one of the Giants, Winslow homer. So if you want to all get yourself strapped in here, here we go. Okay. Patricia's told me that we're going to take a break about mid about midway through okay patrician. So if you do have a quick question if you have, what was that or you want to. Take a lot of time because we want to get through this. I've got a, I've got a bunch of slides to show you. Many of you remember being in Canisius with the old carousel projector, but we're going to plow ahead, but there will be a break. Okay, halfway through the talk. All right, let's get, let's get going now. All right. Winslow homer. About three years ago I was ending my American art seminar and I told the students just as they were leaving the room. And one boy was rushing out and I said okay next week is Homer. And I started the, the following day, the following Monday we started up and we walked in and I said let's do Homer now and the students said, we're going to do Homer Simpson Doctor, are you really going to talk about Homer Simpson? That young man had not realized that Winslow homer is one of the giants of American art that we want to talk about. Well, to set the time and place for our visit this afternoon, we're going to have to think about New England, coastal New England. Some of this has a bit of, yesteryear there is a taste of what, what the New England environment was like in the 19th century. Some of you, your last time or your senior year, remember your days on, on Fairfield Beach and until we recently banned or outlawed or we have the new clam jam. It's a very different experience, but I know coastal New England is going to be in a way the subject matter that Winslow Homer is going to address in these paintings we're going to be looking at. And we have, I'm going to try to set the tone and the mood, give you a sense, think about, here is a map of the Connecticut shoreline when everything was Fairfield, there was no richport yet. Note the prominence of the Sasco River here and Fairfield, not only the town founded in 1639 that those of you that are in New Jersey and Massachusetts that you had the chance to live in our town for four years. This is a very old town in New England considering it was founded in 1639 and considering that's only 19 years after the pilgrims arrived in Cape Cod. And as, as an art historian as an art critic when, when I drive around our coastal shoreline when I look at just yesterday the weather was clear it was beautiful and I was driving down by the Pequot Yacht Club or thinking about the Greenfield Hill onions that were being loaded up to be brought on these on these almost barges down down to the markets in the city. And this is very much the the New England, the, the scenery that we're going to be further north we're going to be up in the Cape and up in Maine. But there is still enough of this as you enjoy hope we just learned that our beaches are going to be open as of May 1. And this is the world we're going to look at one of my favorite spots here. I, I see the little boy resting by the barrels and I think of the old yacht, the old yacht yard here in Southport. Now Homer is quite a character you're going to meet Mr. Homer here and he's quite a character. He is a rather elusive fellow. There's no question. There's absolute unanimity that he is one of the giants of American art. A little bit about his childhood and background and the reason I'm, I'm not doing an ad. No, I'm not a publicist or I'm not on the payroll of Brooks Brothers. But if you, if you read his papers, you go up to Bowdoin College in Maine and you get to read his papers. His most curious little notes to his ailer at the Brooks Brothers in New York. He was, I think he represents something of this idea of the late 19th century gentlemen in, in France. In France, he would be in the generation of Degas, Manet, even the very wealthy impressionist Kayobot. He was something of a dandy. He was something of a, in French we say he was a flanneur, he was a flanneur. A man who understood that his role, he was always from his childhood, an artist is, is actually had came from a very middle class background. He was born in Boston, but his parents moved up to what was then the country out to Cambridge. Let's give it just a quick, I do like to give a written information on a lecture if anyone wants to capture this or you want to take a screenshot of this with your cell phone. He was a pretty clean walk through, born in Boston in 36. They move out. The father was a modest means, but they were, well, they were a perfectly middle class family, very educated family. And his mother taught him, his, hello, his mother taught him watercolor as a young man. He was absolutely destined to be an artist. He, as a young fellow, he goes, he joins the John Buford lithography shop, and this is his real apprenticeship. This is where he learns to do the woodcuts and the engravings in those years. By the, by 1859 he moves to New York City. And then of course the Civil War, which we'll talk about in 1867. Here I am 1867 will go off to Paris will sail with him to Paris will have a little look around what he is studying and painting. And then he comes back to the States, he comes back and he begins seriously working in watercolor in 1873. And in many ways Homer's career could be divided, I would say between the pre 1882 and post 1882 period in this later period of the 80s and 90s, even to his death. He becomes a rather a reckless and there's a caricature of him as being a very hermetic type of fellow. He was, he did have a great sense of humor, but he was really quite a hermit. We'll go to Prout's neck to visit his studio and home. This period will be the dividing line of his life 1881 82 when he goes to live in the northern coast of England, and he lives with the Fisher folk up on the north northern part of England. Near the Newcastle on time. Then we're going to see the last works will be more of the meditation and more of his cerebral work. Now, Homer is arguably one of the most important artists who represents America itself. I don't want to only locate him as a main or as a, as a Boston or main artist. And I relied a lot in my own scholarship on the work of Randall, Randall Griffin Randall is a professor at Southern Methodist University. And I like very much when he talks about Homer's work as an American, the paintings of Homer have shaped a nation's view of itself. Like the poems of Walt Whitman, the pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe, the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the music of Duke Ellington. Homer's scenes have come to stand for a specific place in the American imagination. Now, what we want to test here in the coming, in the coming hour is to, is to test that he is considered to be such a unique phenomenon as an American painter. Let's go back. He's such a unique phenomenon that the, what was previously thought the old scholarship about him was that quote one writer at the turn of the century. He said, for Homer, there was the unique phenomenon of an American, somebody's going to have to mute over there. Okay, so we've got some laughter over there phenomenon of an American painter whose work has in it, not the least Centilla or hint of Europe or Asia. And I would like us to see that, in fact, he was very informed by the new art of, of Europe, and even Asia. This inherent, this indomitable American painter was really open to a global view visiting Homer's world. And I hope that if you've, if you do vacation in Maine, or you are going to plan a trip in the post COVID 19 era, you will make plans to visit the Winslow Homer studio here, which has been entirely rebuilt and reconstructed. This was about a $10 million effort of the Portland Art Museum. Folks, if you want to see Winslow Homer studio, it is open, but it is limited to one Mercedes van at a time. You will meet at the Portland Art Museum, and they will drive you in a van out to Crout's neck to the point where this estate is out on the point. It's a very, it's a private community, it's a rather gated community. And the a compromise was made about eight years ago when the studio was rebuilt so that hordes of tourists would not be on the backyards of these people who have $50 million properties overlooking Prout's neck. So it's, you can contact the Portland Art Museum, and this would be a year ahead, meaning if you want a reservation for June, it's not going to happen, but a year ahead. Now when you do enter into the property, there's a famous legend about how Mr. Homer had become in his later years rather reclusive and even a little bit of a flinty Yankee who really didn't, he didn't suffer fools easily. And so there was this famous sign, snakes, beware, and mice, really cautioning anyone who would come within 100 yards of his studio not to proceed. He even, even people would deliver his mail, his postman would deliver mail to his front door, and sometimes autograph seekers would arrive and he would turn them around and send them away. Now look, I'm not going to dwell much on Mr. Homer's private life. So when you're doing art history, revisionist art history, art history, where we're not simply putting these people on an altar and making them into demigods, there is of course a great deal of interest in the personal life of artists, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and his wife, Edward Hopper and Josephine. So this is part of the field, we do talk, but we do want to understand. The problem in Homer's career was that his personal life was very limited. He did have a failed romance with Helena Decay. She eventually married a poet and writer, Gilder. He was courting her in the early 1870s. Dr. Sarah Burns at the University of Indiana has really cracked this nut. She has been reading the letters that he was writing to her, comparing her presence to a Beethoven symphony, as any of your members of you will always be. It's very tender, the writings, the epistolary exchange is very endearing, but she broke it off. And that was pretty much the last time we have a romance in the life. Now here, now you have to stay with us here because of course in the academy today, there is an honesty and a candidness about dealing with people's private and sexual. And gender roles. Homer, in the last 20 years, a generation of younger scholars are really beginning to look at the way Homer is, he seems to be very passively, or as Dr. Griffin says Homer's private life was elusive. The analysis in Griffin's work is that there are latent and repressed homosexual feelings. That is, in an era, of course, before Stonewall, before anyone had ever heard of something called gay rights, I like to remind my friends in the medical and psychiatric community that homosexuality was considered in the medical textbook, a disease until 1992 in the United States, and was eligible for felony and conviction in England. So we have come a long way in understanding the inner lives of these artists. Acons and sergeants are also artists that we've had tremendous amount of interest of their, whether bisexuality or the latent homosexuality, and I just put it out there as part of what we should be understanding. Now the traditional approach and the art historian who was, I have to tell you when I was an undergraduate, when I was a graduate student, he was almost the great lord of American art. I mean, I personally, I've worshiped his work, and I had the great, great privilege of having Lloyd Goodrich, who was the director of the Whitney Museum, he wrote the introduction to my first book on Paul Cadmus. And it was Goodrich, who really brought us deep into the mind shaft of understanding his book on Winslow Homer of 1944, published by the Whitney Museum, was really the first time where we understood him. Here, as Mr. Goodrich said, Homer was the most vital and colorful of these Americans. He appeals equally to the artist and the layman, by his picturing of stirring aspects of nature and humanity, by the freshness of his vision, and by his high degree of artistry. And I would add to that that it's not only his experimental naturalism, it's not only his freshness of the vision that Goodrich talks about, but it's also he understood the dark side. And you're always on the edge with Homer, you're always on the edge. We have, of course, the library shelves and the bookshelves are filled with, this is a goldmine of material that scholars will be mining, in the way we're still writing about Michelangelo and Leonardo 500 years later. I'm sure in the next 50 to 100 years we're going to have even more and more brilliant analysis of the work of Winslow Homer. All right. Now, the first painting we're going to look at will be up in Boston and note I want you to always understand reality that these are paintings that in a generation gen gen X gen Z, or even the millennial generation. You tend to think of art as images on screens, and it is vital to maintain the presence of the actual artwork. So the fog warning, which you'll be able to see when you visit Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Now, to understand the fog warning, to understand the fog warning, let's go back to understand this painting, the fog warning. You have here the quintessential Homer painting, drama, danger, impending catastrophe. I always think of the interviews when Alfred Hitchcock was talking about what made his movies so suspenseful, and it was the psychological sense of, well, we're left in the lurch of what happens next. Fog warning, the, the fishermen out on the grand banks, probably off of a great fishing vessel out of, out of Gloucester. Note how the elements horizon, note the elements horizon, human, the equality of the, of nature, wild nature, the giant haddock that has been pulled from the briny depths and disaster, disaster as the fishing vessel with the wind sailing as the ominous fog warning is closing in on the lonesome, and we're left with this question, will he make it? Will he make it? Fog warning. Well, we go out to the grand banks and Homer was, no, he was not a poser. He wasn't, he wasn't posing with his love of adventure. He really was a sportsman, an adventurer, a fisherman. He went out on these fishing expeditions out into the grand banks and he witnessed these fishing, these sometimes two, three week long fishing expeditions. But we have to understand that the cod, that the cod off of Cape Cod, that the cod that is so dense in, in terms of its biomass in off of Maine and out into the grand banks becomes economically understood. If we understand that you have here between Maine and Boston and really in New York, the largest Catholic population in the Northeast. Take a look for a moment at the events, the Irish Catholic immigration after the great Irish potato famine. My wife and I had the privilege of spending a week in Ireland this year. We just adored it. We adored every moment in Ireland and you really understand the effects of, of the famine. Sorry. Here we are. Pardon me. Here's Irish immigration greens. Pardon me. Here we are. Here's the first great spike of Irish immigration in the decades of the 1840s and 50s. Then, look at this spike. Italians, Italians look at the spike here around the 1890s 1900. And so there you have it. You have here the largest Catholic population of the United States crowded into the northeastern seaboard. And of course, for Homer, coming from a New England Protestant family, he was under, he would have been very aware of the, the very vicious type of anti-immigrant, populist, xenophobic, anti-Catholicism, anti-papal feelings. This is Thomas Nast, cartoonist for the Harper's Magazine in 1875, transforming the crocodiles of the Nile and the Ganges into the Papal miters, turning the pope into predatory monsters that would be affecting the Protestant population of America. Which had to be defended upon this onslaught. Note the American flag in distress upside down, while the flag of St. Peter's and the flags of the church in the background. This is also part of the landscape to understand the world of the, the, the fog, why this incredible need to populate, to feed the population of the northeast here is a bio, a biological study of cod migration in the North Atlantic from 2005. And I think you can see it's quite, this would be very rich fishing banks, particularly, so he's, he would be coming out of Maine and coming out of Gloucester here and out here on the Grand Banks. This is just, just an infinity of fish at that time. Now, this becomes then the iconic image of the American hero. Brave, courageous, alone, doing his work toiling with little reward. And I want you to think about that, that pioneering that one man against the element image here. As we go forward and think about then, as a mythology will grow a very powerful mythology in literature, in filmmaking, in ideas of the heroic fishermen. I'm not talking about the Mrs. Paul's fish sticks that I used to, my mother used to heat up for me at lunchtime when I was a schoolboy. I can still taste those Mrs. Paul's fish sticks. But I'm talking about, again, the authenticity, the not the heroic, not the fisherman who is being lionized but the kind of lonesome and just endless toil freezing in the waters off of the Cape. Tossed on the waves in his frail dory, his subject to perils unknown to the fishermen of olden times. A greater foe than carelessness lies in wait for its prey. The stealthy fog enraps him in its folds, it blinds his vision, it cuts off all marks to guide his course and leaves him afloat in a measureless void. Now that tradition is enhanced then, Rudyard Kipling will write Captain's Courageous and Captain's Courageous becomes, oh what happened here, hold on, here we go, here's Captain's Courageous. And now it's greatly popularized in American popular culture, Hollywood film based on Kipling's Captain's Courageous, the Hollywood film Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney and Captain's Courageous. Again, this is how we mythologize in American culture, we take the literary and political histories and turn them into these Hollywoodized versions. And more recently, we all, those of you who read Sebastian Younger's book, The Perfect Storm, the Halloween Storm of October 28, 1991. The crew of the long line fishing crew, they were out for swordfish, out of Gloucester, all six men lost at sea. That film, if I remember taking my kids were teenagers and they were, this was a harrowing experience for them to imagine the danger that these men here is the actual lost crew of the Andrea Gale. So I show you this understand that a lot of this is based in reality. And if you visit Gloucester, you're going to understand this is deeply inclined in the heritage of Cape Anne and of the community of they that go down to the sea in ships. Here we make a transition, we're going to leave the waters off of the off of the Cape and off of Maine, and we're going to now begin our journey, Westford Ho, and I'm going to try to tie this together. I do this in my American studies in my, we have a very robust program, a master's degree program in American studies and it's a moment. When I get to this part of the transition from the heroics of the maritime and nautical tradition of the Northeast, which begins obviously back into the 17th and 18th century. And as we now open up the American continent. And the, those of the high school teachers that are in those master's classes, they really latch on to this this becomes a great teaching tool as I try to, I try to carry this Westford manifest destiny movement. First articulated by John O'Sullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and the Democratic Review, and it is there that the coin destiny was coin encouraging the spirit of expansionism. Now think about that lonesome fisherman off of the Northeast and then think about what it took to be a pioneer to cross this great vast continent. In 1860, the new US capital was being constructed that is Abraham Lincoln here at the time of his first inauguration that is Abraham Lincoln here, and a mural that was to be to be completed inside the new capital dome, really captures the zeitgeist and the spirit and the it animates the American idea of the 1860s of Westward the course of empire, Emmanuel Lloyds is painting Lloyds you might know as the painter who did the George Washington crossing the Delaware in the metropolitan So take a look at this optimistic painting of adventure of pioneering spirit, and I'd like to bring your attention not to this kind of holy family, this type of holy family out in the wilderness, not in the wilderness of Egypt and not the Madonna and maybe Jesus and Joseph, but a new kind of American iconic hero, the hero here the adventurer, the lonesome cowboy. Here we see him. And it is my argument and when I write and present this talk on Homer that this is directly into these are these are the early maritime prototypes for what will become the American Lone Ranger and the Lone Ranger, who will conquer the continent and the Rockies and settle the West. And to what we venerate what we admire the heroism, Josh, Joshua Slocum, the very first man to solo voyage, circumnavigate the globe in his great sailing yacht, the spray. He left Boston Harbor, April 24 1895. He returns around the world. 46,000 miles later, he comes into Newport in 1898. That is the maritime. That is the hero. So some of you remember sitting in Canisius Hall and somewhere in my lectures, whether you were in my American art class, I was talking about mythology. This is all coming out of Jungian archetypes, the need to identify heroic values to to to personify the American archetype. And I, my present my idea is that this is exactly what Homer comes upon. Now this becomes this is a cottage industry. You could you can go to museums from, you know, starting in the Midwest when you start getting out into the museums and not in Kansas and Idaho and then up into Idaho and up into the Nebraska and up into the Dakotas. This is what the American mythic hero is about that heroism of the lonesome cowboy and then commercially commercially translated into that which becomes the most powerful commercial branding. I remember, you know, landing in airports in Rome or landing in airports outside of Kathmandu in Nepal and driving into the town into Kathmandu and or into Rome or into Munich and seeing billboards of the mob or old man, the mythic American prototype hero. And that is very fascinating as you interpret and fold it out into understanding what then are the elements of what we consider heroism courage and leadership what is what is it it becomes this type of courage, masculinity, defining masculinity. And I want you to all appreciate that in the academy today, we are looking at the deconstruction of masculinity and understanding the false and some of the even toxic values of this fake masculinity that we need to in some way, in a positive way, not direct our nine and 10 year old boys into thinking of what is it means to be a man. I'm fast. I teach a class every two years on art and propaganda art and politics, and this becomes again, over the past 2030 40 years of you in my classroom. How fascinating some of you were in the class in the 1980s when we looked at the most perfect model. You couldn't create you couldn't invent you couldn't design a perfect American archetypal hero as Ronald Reagan becoming president of the United States. It was not an accident that Reagan's presidency. Every photograph of him outside of the White House out at his ranch in California, always high in the saddle, always that tradition then is countered by what we call the anti intellectual tradition. And nothing was worse when I was watching the 2008 election. And again in 12. Where would they get to take a whack. Where would the opposition of Obama that he was the worst possible lowest pond scum imaginable. He was a law professor, intellectual law professor. This was the antithesis of the American masculine hero. And I put that out there for you to understand that we do value these themes these meta and these mega themes in American history. This is what we want to teach and believe and talk about as the virtues of the American experience. The way we lionized our heroes the Apollo astronauts. President Kennedy creating an amazing challenge will go to the moon in a decade by the 80s. President Reagan and articulated the high frontier, not the Western frontier, not the gold rush or the but the Star Wars frontier. And I'm sure we're all feeling a lot safer and sounder now we have the space force that is going to be continuing and this truly is a continuation of this American meta theme. All right, well I've gone through about half of our talk let's anyone want to jump in with a question Patricia. Well I do. And just to remind folks, if they have a question they can type it in the chat function here on the zoom but I do have a question for you. When you showed the morning you mentioned it was purchased by the Boston Museum in 1894. But why were the Metropolitan Museum in New York City Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Art Museum so delayed in their appreciation of American artists. Okay, that's that's a fascinating moment. The founders of the Metropolitan Museum. There, their objective of the Vanderbilt's and the, the great families of New York, the Tildens, they wanted to bring European culture to import European culture as high culture, and then to teach the working folks what being what what civilized culture was about. It was a very didactic type of hierarchical and even a kind of a new American aristocracy of the 1870s and 80s. They wanted the museums to be treasure treasure treasure temples of European culture. The American art world did not awaken until the careers of Winslow Homer Thomas Acons and John Singer sergeant so it will not be until the turn of the century that we're going to see these paintings entering the painting the fog warning just to give you an idea sold for $850 in 1885. And I do want there I'm impressed. But painting was purchased by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts because it had a New England theme, but the price was $850 later in his career by the turn of the century. Winslow Homer paintings were selling for $25,000. I'm going to show you a painting called the Gulf Stream. But in 1900 paintings were being purchased by the Met and the Boston Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of European masters Rubens Rembrandt Van Dyke for $100,000. So even our greatest American artist at that time, he was only getting one quarter of the value. Okay, any other questions. Any other questions. Shall we move on. All right, let's move on. Yes. All right. Trained as a lithographer at the bouffard studio in Boston. He is a skilled apprentice artist. And he picks up a job. Here we are in those Halcyon anti-Bellum days celebrating doing a double page woodcut spread for Harper's Weekly in 1859. No one at this moment would think that Homer is going to evolve and break out to become one of the major figures. He's a pedestrian and rather a folksy illustrator at this time. The turning point of for American history at this, of course, is will be the declaration of war, the succession of the southern states, the confederacy's succession from the Union. Here's a snapshot of the states. And I'd like you to see that Homer was sent by Harper's and Scribner's, and he had a press pass. He was allowed across the lines of the army of the Potomac, and he was allowed to go deep into Virginia, even to the confederate side to observe during the law and during the period when between battles. And he painted and drew a lot of the boredom as the confederate, as the confederate army, oh that's good, the confederate army was gaining strength and he was an eye witness to these events. Now, I'm only putting this Frederick Church painting in Frederick Church of Hartford, Connecticut. This is one of my absolute favorite American paintings. It's a little painting out in San Francisco that the Rockefeller family purchased. It's a tiny little painting. It's probably no bigger than your laptop or your computer screen. But it is, I think, one of the most powerful commentaries on how a northern, the Bostonian family felt that their country, or in this case, Frederick Church, a Connecticut family, felt that their lives had been ripped apart by the succession of the Union. Here is Winslow Homer. Now, this is greatly staged. It's a tableau vivante. Of course, it's just based on recollections and interviews with soldiers. He was not in the thick of battle. This is not, this is not Ordie Murphy. This is not a war correspondent in Afghanistan. This is artificially, but there's enough detail taken from interviews of what it was like in some of the early battles in Virginia. And that those numbers become even more harrowing as we look at the 620,000 by far the largest loss of life of Americans in any military conflict was in the Civil War. 620,000 of the Union and Confederate forces died. Homer's response is so brilliant and so succinctly to the point. He creates this woodcut for Harper's Magazine. And here I'm so glad that I have the opportunity to share this with my students at the Metropolitan. It's the painting that I'm transfixed when I'm looking at this painting. When we stand in front of this veteran in a new field of 1865. This painting in its solemnity in its singularity. In its meaningful interpretation. This was the time. This is the time for defining what we might say that the Jeffersonian nature of American culture, the idea of returning to the farm, this union farmer this fellow I want to point out his canteen. And his old Union uniform is here. This is the best pair of woolen trousers he will ever own us army standard and his the suspender britches. He puts his canteen aside, and he goes back to his home in Connecticut or Massachusetts or Maine. The painting is the solemnity of it is so overwhelming. And I think that here again, when we talk about is he connecting us to Roman history, the Roman general Cincinnati's gave up his military role to become a farmer for the good of Rome. To return to his simple farm. No longer the glories of Rome. And as you look at this painting, and it's it by now the modern, the modern wheat cutting mechanisms would have already been invented. But he takes us to the moment from the writings of in the in Scripture of Isaiah. Neither shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift the sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. And that's what I think he's doing in this painting. It's a kind of metamorphosis of from the from being a warrior and escaping the, the, the tragedy the horror the death of those battlefields of Virginia and the battlefields, all the way to Vicksburg and all the way, all the to becoming a productive civilian and citizen. And this is very Jeffersonian in its democracy of the landowner. I like to in my, usually in my midterm exam, I asked the students write a comparison between Homer's veteran in the new field. And this gem van Gogh's sore, painted in the, in the free song in the, in the effervescence of van Gogh arriving in the south of France arriving in excellent Provence and the intensity and the heat here again van Gogh being another naturalist but interpreting the natural world in his own way. Wheat, farmer, sunshine elements. In 1867, if he's going to be an artist he knows he has to go to Paris. He knows he has to go to the city of light. He knows that that this is where the great studios where the Academy and the Ecole de Beaux-Arts of France he's going to have to study. He makes a trip and it's it's really a reconnaissance trip. What I want to show you is something remarkable. Winslow Homer, after just a year in, in the milieu of young Degas, young Manet, young Monet, returns to Long Branch, New Jersey. This, this painting is in long, is a painting of Long Branch, New Jersey. And you could argue that it is in as advanced as the first generation of the impressionist that it depicts with its sense of liveliness and spontaneity and the lightness of the brush. Of airiness. You can see that Homer is, has almost immediately synthesized what will define a new generation, a new type of painting. Now I want to tell you a little known fact that while everyone who goes, whether you're in Paris at the Zed Arsé, and you see all those masterpieces of Monet and Renoir, one after another gobs and gobs of beauty, and you, you have to understand how and why this generation of the 1860s and 70s suddenly begins to understand we can paint out of doors. And what was the secret that allowed them to paint out of doors? Here it is. In 1840, an American painter first began to experiment with using a tube. And this tube was then copied by the Windsor Company of London. These were perforated pigs' bladders. These were perforated pigs' bladders. The idea of putting pigment into tubes and then into what were then, these were glass and then into zinc tubes. And then this by 1904, the tube cap, allowing this pigment to remain fresh. This is a complete technological revolution in the history of painting. It's a revolution. And this is why artists now can paint out of doors, en plein air, and to feel the sense of instantaneity, freshness, light, sunlight, shadow, transitory movement, all of that captured because of this technological invention. Monet Givernais, he met the young Monet. Homer is the first American artist to be given a one-man show at the galleries at Givernais, the first American to be given that honor. The turning point of Winslow Homer's career, and I think he's fleeing from his broken heart and his heartache over his failed romantic adventures, but I think the turning point of his career takes place northern England. Folks, we are in Newcastle here. We're up here in Newcastle. And this is, if you go another 20 miles north, you're almost in Scotland. You're way up on the Newcastle upon Tyne. And you go out to this place called Colourcoats. Colourcoats out here. Now Colourcoats was for England and for the romantic painters of England. It was a kind of resort. And the local fisherwomen particularly wore very colorful outfits. And this was a kind of romantic escape. He wanted to leave, he wanted to leave London, he wanted to leave Boston and New York. He wanted to be alone. And he becomes this, the American who lives in this Huddleston Arms Hotel in this little fishing village in the North Sea. And he lives here, as you can see, from 81 to 82. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is where Homer becomes an artist, a drama of power, of darkness, and of elementary power. The threatening seas, the darkness, instead of his palette going on the light side, the dark drama seeps into these as these women waiting for their husbands who come back from their fishing expeditions on the North Sea. And note how stoic, note how monumental the women are here, the Colourcoats, fisherfolk women. He comes back to the States and here I'm, look, for those of you who are from New York or New Jersey, you know, from New York, you have to learn how to say it's the Van Wyck, it's the Van Wyck, it's not Van Wyck, it's Van Wyck. Or, you know, you learn about, if you're from New Jersey, it's Weehawken, but one of the biggest faux pas is to walk into a classroom with a bunch of Fairfield students from Boston, or Cape Ann, and you start talking about Gloucester, Gloucester. You've got to understand it's Gloucester, like lobster, it's Gloucester, and up in Gloucester, this is going to be the seaport, Gloucester is going to be his favorite painting seaport, and it's here, in 73 to 76, coming out of Gloucester, and in fact, written right here on the stern, it says Gloucester here. And this painting is such a gem, the Mellon family bought this for the National Collection in Washington, 1943. Always learn to read the labels in museums. This was the 13th painting entered into the collection in 1943, purchased by the Mellon Foundation, and given to the National Gallery of Art. Breezing up. This painting has, again, elemental composition, and yet if you begin to deconstruct it, you understand the power. The young boy, the dead is out, maybe with, maybe his three sons. Homer was the middle child of three boys. The thoughtful, pensive, introspective, middle son. If any of you are middle sons of the three, you share an affinity with me. Thank you. I'm the middle son, too, and very distinct from my older brother and my younger brother. I like to see myself as the middle son, so balanced, right? No. Note that the older son is pulling on the tiller. He's pulling on the tiller, but dad, dad, who's got control of the sheep. Dad is looking out onto the horizon. Dad understands that on this lovely Sunday afternoon, he is, doesn't have to go out and toil on the fishing fleet. He can enjoy a Sunday, a Sabbath Sunday with his boys, but he understands the fickleness of nature. Dad understands that he cannot protect his three sons, even though the one son seems so confident holding onto that line. But dad sees that a squall is building off in the distance. And maybe some of you, some of you sailors and some of you yachtsmen in the group, you know what it's like to be cruising off of Narragansett Bay or maybe you're cruising off of Long Island Sound or wherever you live. And a summer outing can turn into disaster very quickly. It's a cat boat, the Gloucester, turning home into the late afternoon into the breeze. Everything here is balanced and it's the other feng shui of this. It's so perfectly balanced and the pieces of the puzzle seem to be almost perfectly sutured in. But again, keep your eye on dad who really knows that there is ominous and foreboding danger out there. Yes, seafaring and the maritime trade is can be delightful and cruising and being out on ships can be delightful, but it can also be disastrous. The largest shipwreck off of the northeast coast off of Halifax was the white star lines, the Atlantic, which sunk on April 1 1873 off of Halifax. This is 25, I'm sorry, this is two generations before the sinking of the white star line Titanic. But you see here, and this is the type of journalism that Homer did, he wanted to study what happened at this disaster, the wreck of the Atlantic, and he comes up with one brilliant composition. He carves this woodcut for harpers. Here is the here's the ship up on the rocks, and he focuses on this Domzel in distress. And she is so pathetically let's take a look at the painting now. There she is the wreck of the Atlantic. Here's the painting. Oh, sorry. Here's I'm sorry. Here's the full sheet I'm sorry this was not transformed into a painting pardon me. This is the full sheet. Let me show you the detail. Now you get into the groove, the depth of his modeling. Those younger art historians I talked to you about earlier do declare they do sense that the body type, he does tend to masculinize even these female figures there is a maybe an androgyny and ambiguity, which is part of Homer's elusiveness. Note how she clutches pathetically to the life to the ropes that would have been her last connection to the lifeboat before she was washed out to see in the wreck. Now, let's do a check. Let's do a Europe and America check. Here she is your Domzel in distress. And here would have been the hit painting of the salon of 1863. Now is birth of Venus, which was the talk of the salon of 1863 the prize winner at the palette Paris salon. And you can see it's an utterly absurd painting. Completely. No, no sense of reality. This body is porcelain. The female figure is some type of, you know, male gazing image of sexuality and eroticism but nothing as powerful as this poor girl ripped cast out like lots of on the shore. It's a very dramatic contrast. The lifeline. Homer would vacation off of the Atlantic Atlantic City when Atlantic City was becoming a popular resort in the 1870s and 80s. And this is an actual this is a ship to ship rescue. Now, I want you to appreciate what's going on here. This is the breaches boy. This is called a breaches boy. And we're looking at a ship to ship transfer when the waves are so the troughs of the waves make using life boats impossible. Now note the composition that just bangs us boom right into the center. The eye focuses on the tragedy. Here we see how the life of the Coast Guard would use the breaches boy in order to take a survivors off of disaster, disastrous wrecks and ships. These are actual photos. Here's a girl having a good time demonstrating. Here's the life saving device, very ingenious way the breaches boy. Now, here now we're focusing on the lifelong, the polarities of left and right. But what is most fascinating and I've spoken about his ambiguities on his relation to women is that he definitely you rather sizes the the stricken female, the male rescuer is faceless. Her scarf, it covers him in the breeze. And she is helpless and she is like a PA TA helpless. But what was the most scandalous part of this painting scandalous was the flesh of her knees and her legs because you see everybody in the late 19th century. It was standard. It was typical. It was expected that female models would appear with a very low bust line the decolletage the decolletage. Here, of course, is the beauty from New Orleans. Madame go throw fell in love with Dr. Haddon secret love affair with Dr. Potsie and her husband, Madame go throws husband erupted when John Singer sergeants painting was shown at the salon of 1884 because of her strapless gown. Seeing female flesh bosom rest line was standard in the late 19th century. Homer is showing her rumors, even a bit of pink part of her undergarments here and the flesh of her leg and note even the centrality of the emphasis on the groin and the pubic area which really becomes the center of the painting as a highly so danger death and eroticism all melded in this. I tell you this painting, the tension of it. It's unbearable. It's unbearable tension. And I think the sister painting, and I love this is the sister painting, because it is also done off of the New Jersey coastline is also done. He witnessed a rescue of women off of shoreline deep in the, in the undertow. And this painting here again, let's always remember we're looking at real canvas real paintings before we zoom in on the undertow. And here you have this vigorous male life force and the virility of the men, the virility of the dashing man ready to face any danger and the pathetic and helpless woman. shown in the in the crest of the wave. Let's take a moment to study up close and again very, very powerfully depicted with the kind of glistening paint off of her surface as she is passive women are passive they don't they have no inner strength. The men are the indomitable forces, the life force. Those of you who sat in Canisius Hall and remember your, your studies with the Parthenon, the metapy, the Parthenon pediment. Maybe you studied with Dr Schwab, of course, about Greek art, but I would have shown this to you in intro to art history. Who could forget the Elgin marbles that are in London that Homer drew sketches. In his own notebooks. And as you can see very clearly in the drawing for the in preparing for the undertow painting, you can see that he's used the Elgin marbles as a kind of rhythmic flowing diaphanous drapery of classicism off of the Jersey shore. One quote that I think in work we're coming to the end everybody, but any discussion of Winslow Homer that fails to acknowledge his primacy as a water colorist has really missed the point. Homer critiques himself and says, you will see in the future. I will live by my water colors. The problem that I want you to understand while these in Boston and at the Met, we have great paintings, oil paintings. These paintings are delicate. They are transitory to light. And nobody walks into a major museum and says, Oh, I want to go see the little water colors by Turner or Constable, or I want to see the delicate water colors. No, we want to see big, we want to see big muscular oil paintings. And so a connoisseur of of American painting and somebody who's seeking to really understand Homer, go to his water colors. It is his greatest genius. Any of us who in our amateurish and, and rather clumsy way have tried to do water color. He is the master, the ability to hold the transparency of life, the way he's able to hold the painting together and it's holding the beauty of the scene. But at the same time, giving us an intimacy of his brush, it's extraordinary. And he's at his best. When he, at this time, by the 1890s, he's quite wealthy. He's a prominent American artist. And he's able to, he's vacationing every winter. He's not up in Prout's neck and he's not up in, he's in Cuba. He's in Key West. He's in Bermuda. And he's in the Virgin Islands. He's, and look, let's enjoy the smooth rhythms, the tempos, the melodies of, and the utmost clarity, the mastery, the bravura of holding and knowing just how to hold enough, enough pigment and then to let it flow, to let it go. Well, the most powerful painting. And the painting that you can see at the Metropolitan Museum is the Gulf Stream of 1899. I love this painting. And it is everything that I have ever taught about American art in the 19th century, because it depicts and it counterbalances the forces of wild nature with the isolation of the this poor island native, the black sailor out of, probably out of Cuba or out of Bermuda, who is about to be swallowed by a squall. Blood is in the water. The sharks are waiting. And this, this painting, here's Homer at the end of his life. This painting was purchased and one of the first major American paintings in the Metropolitan Museum in 1906. The Tildens and the Vanderbiltz and that generation wanted the Rembrandts and the Velasquez's and the van Dykes. And here comes barging his way into the Met. Here comes Winslow Homer with a painting of the Wolf Collection of 1806. Homer is a scientific naturalist. His mind is completely up to date. He's not some La La Land artist often in the days. He's totally up to date on the writings of Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle. And he's fascinated by the plotting of the global currents and little known fact it was in fact Matthew Fontaine Mallory, who is Mallory was the founding father of modern oceanography. And he's the one who first charted the Gulf Stream and published this in a book in the 1870s on the on the currents of the northeast of the currents of the world. I'm sorry. Mallory was a very good friend of the Homer family and a very good friend of Homer's brother Charles. They met each other at Harvard. So here is our abandoned black Bermudian native here he is completely left in the forces of nature completely left alone. You can see he is the sharks are are preparing for their lunch. He is the helpless victim. You can see him working out this story. Will the black fisherman will be will he make it. Here we see maybe one more tilting over maybe the openness of the open part of the of the hall opening to the deck below to the open mouth of the shark. Here now he is gone into the water and the sharks the predators get the upper hand. He's working this out as process as process. This is in a tradition of American paintings. John Singleton copies Watson and the shark Lord Mayor of London who fell off of a British frigate and ends up in in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, Havana, Cuba. Watson Lord Watson who will have a peg leg and walk around London from his childhood experience as on a on a royal vessel as look at the eye and mouth, the eye and the mouth. This is the Delacroix bark of Dante, again the doomed fisherman the doomed in the sea in a voyage through hell. One of the great paintings in the Louvre that he saw when he was in Paris. And so this you know this is this primordial fear that we have the primordial fear. Being abandoned being left to the howling wilderness of nature shark teeth I open a gate mouth and I who in the 19th century in age of the industrial evolution will man or beast get the upper hand. And in a very modernist view, the surrealist artist, fascinated in their erotic fantasies with the vagina dentata. Here's Picasso's being Picasso's fear of being eaten alive by like praying mantises by women by in the demo as else the avenue Picasso felt that he was going to be eaten by the vagina the vagina of predatory women turned into a Freudian surrealist fantasy, which is really the extension of this romanticized imagery of American painting into modern painting. And dare I say, as we sit here on our zoom and under house arrest that we too, as 62,000 Americans have died. We too are humbled and left without any recourse as an alien force of nature, biological nature is in is devouring us at the very moment we speak what happened to that black fisherman off of Bermuda. Remember, as I said that the Homer family were very educated abolitionist, very connected to the abolitionist movement. He would have understood the role of black people in post civil war in the period in the era of you know post civil war reconstruction. And I like to now show you what I'd like to tell you is the end of the story, because he understood this and he, as he worked out the process. In this watercolor of 1899, our black fisherman is washed ashore. He survived. He survived battered, tattered, humiliated and a metaphor of the humiliation and of the destruction of millions of black souls in America in the in his own lifetime. He made it. The fear of that black sailor is unknown, but at least he didn't drown in the sea. Homer's late years become more meditative. He takes us up to Gloucester. Now it becomes meditative. The art becomes tranquil. You can see the sense of almost a sense of emersonian transcendentalism here. This is the spirit of emerson, of thorough, of making peace with nature, living in equanimity and calm as the seas. These are, by the way, these are the rocks. When you go to the proud snack to the studio and you're allowed to climb down and you will have a wonderful little visit walking on Winslow Homer's own little promontory here. Here we are at proud snack. And when I look at this painting, which is almost towards, we're at the very towards the end of his life. There is a Zen meditation, there's a sense of almost Japanese and Asian harmony and design in this painting. It has such a sense. Yes, nature remains powerful, but in this calming horizontal, he opens up into the 20th century. And I can't imagine anyone who would look at a painting by Mark Rothko and not give a tip of the hat to what Homer had understood 50 years earlier. In the end, the sea and nature dominate. We are, but against, you know, of mice and men, as Steinbeck would say, we're simply of our greatest plans. Now the human figure is absent, the great swells, the great power of the sea. And he goes to his reward. He dies in 1910. He's buried. This is the cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. Mount Orburn Cemetery. He's buried next to his two brothers in the family plot. There is a nothing, from my point of view, nothing less than a universalist vision in the work of Winslow Homer. Yes, quintessentially American, taking the best of European painting, new styles, understanding the freshness and spontaneity of Impressionism. But there is something powerful here as we look at the Great Wave, this great print of Ken Agua of 1833. And we think about Homer's understanding of the individual. When you paint, try to put it down exactly what you say, exactly. Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway. All right, that's all folks and Dr. Liza, we do have some questions. All right, go ahead. So from Jed. The question is in several, several of the images you shared fog veteran breezing up Atlantic lifeline undertow, there appears to be an affinity for movement directional attention or leaning to the left. Is there a symbolic reason for this, what this may suggest or indicate. To great question, Jed. My sense is that when he's positioning his figures out on the water, he doesn't want to paint into the sun. I suspect that he's he is always on the south side of whatever ship or whatever figures, and he wants to he doesn't want to be glaring into the sunlight. So he puts them against the horizon line. That's the push pull is always about where to position the outline and silhouette of the figures against the horizon line, the maximum effect. Okay, good question, Jed. And Dr. Liza, I have another one for you. You showed examples of Homer's works after his visits to France in 1867 and England 1881 1882, especially the one from my home state of New Jersey long branch 1869. Love it. How did he transform the important artworks on the continent into his own American language. Well, I think that's, you know, if we have another 3040 years we could be we could be exploring that I think that that is probably America in the post Civil War era. In the reconstruction from the 1870s to the 1890s was a period of tremendous positivism optimism. We celebrated the 100th the Centennial in 1876. And you can, you can just see, you know, think of America, think of America, think of the culture 1865 to 1875, which is for me very similar to America between 1945 and 1960, full of hope, full of optimism. He knew that in order when he begins to take on the mantle of being a great painter. He knows he has to go to Paris, he has to go to the Louvre. There's no, there's no Instagram there's no virtual, even black and white photographs of great old master paintings. Everyone made the pilgrimage, just like Hawthorne, just like the writers just like Mark Twain. This was a period when Americans went abroad, but he brings back a knowledge of the, the new styles developing the break with the tight academic method, the new fresh. As, as a core core core base said to be a painter of of modern life. And I think he's a painter of modern life in America, rhyming with optimism in the era of the 1870s, 80s and 90s. You know, ending up in the era of the Gilded Age and then by the turn of the century he's living up in Maine and he's pretty much a hermit. So I thank you very much. I think that's it. Um, Dr. It is always as I said in the beginning, it's always such an honor and a pleasure to work with you. I can't thank you enough for sharing your time, your talents and your expertise with us to everybody who attended today. Thank you as well. I look forward to seeing you all sometime soon. But until then be well and stay safe. Those tags, those tags, those tags. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Jed. Take care. Good.