Suspended above the sea, the drama of this rescue scene comes from nature, not man.
Winslow Homer, The Life Line, 1884, oil on canvas, 72.7 x 113.7 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] It would seem that a painting of a woman being rescued from a shipwreck by a courageous man who’s risking his life would be filled with sentiment and emotion.
[0:16] What’s so wonderful to me about Winslow Homer is the lack of that sentiment. We have this incredibly dramatic moment, but Homer has not exploited it emotionally.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:27] In fact, he’s even hidden the face of the hero.
Dr. Harris: [0:30] That’s a remarkable decision, when you think about it. The man who’s saving this woman’s life, his face is completely obscured by this scarf that just happens at this moment to have whipped in front of his face, but of course, this isn’t a photograph.
Dr. Zucker: [0:44] This incredible sense of a kind of selfless heroism. These paintings by Homer were recognized as inherently American. Their themes, I think, still resonate with us.
[0:53] When you listen to somebody who’s performed a dramatic rescue, perhaps, on the nightly news, they will sort of push the camera away. There is a way in which we want to be selfless in these moments.
Dr. Harris: [1:03] We have a real feeling of watching this drama unfold.
Dr. Zucker: [1:07] The emphasis is almost on the mechanics of the rescue. This was a new technology that allowed for the rescue of people from ships near the shore.
[1:15] You can just make out the loose sail billowing in the upper left corner. You can see people who are watching the rescue on rocks at the upper right. In fact, that rope bows down and we can feel the weight of these figures as they skirt, with their feet, this terrifying surf.
[1:30] The colors and the tones are so subdued, and they create a sense of the freezing menace of the water. It’s not just that they’re soaked through, they don’t have much time. That woman is unconscious and close to freezing to death. There is this real sense of urgency.
Dr. Harris: [1:45] When we look at the water, we see grays, and pale blues, and tones of white. And lots of different kinds of brushstrokes, from little dabs of paint that suggest the water spraying upward to longer strokes that suggest the force of the waves.
Dr. Zucker: [2:02] I actually love that area just at the cliffs on the upper right. You can see the spray dissolving even those solid blacks. And if you look at the waves immediately below the cliffs, you can see the translucency where the wave is very thin and the light moves through it.
Dr. Harris: [2:15] Look at the man’s right foot in the water. You feel it dragging, and the way it’s slowing them down as they move along this pulley.
Dr. Zucker: [2:24] There’s a real sense of the particulars that make this seem so immediate, and I love the way that water drips from that cord.
Dr. Harris: [2:32] Somehow the paint seems wet, as though there were water spraying up from below, that the clothing the figures are wearing is soaked through.
Dr. Zucker: [2:41] In fact, in some ways, this painting is a nude. The woman is wearing a dress and is absolutely proper, but her outfit is so laden with water that it follows the contours of her body.
Dr. Harris: [2:51] Look at the drops of water from her right hand. He could really paint.
Dr. Zucker: [2:55] If you follow her hips down, there’s a little bit of skin that’s exposed just above her knee and you see a little bit perhaps of her petticoat below her dress. I can almost imagine a 19th-century viewer wanting to pull that down to retrieve her modesty.
Dr. Harris: [3:09] This is really typical of the subject that Homer painted later in his career when he lived in Maine. This idea of man and the forces of nature and the futility of man’s efforts in the face of nature — although in this case we do have a successful struggle.
Dr. Zucker: [3:24] Obviously, Homer didn’t paint this on the beach watching a rescue. The painting is based loosely on a fairly recent rescue off the coast of New Jersey, but was actually posed in New York City, where he kept his studio even after he had moved to Prout’s Neck. This was the studio building on West 10th Street.
[3:41] Imagine, then, his models up on the roof, and him drenching them with water to make the effect just right. He was recognized as a brilliant painter in his own day. He was honored as the foremost American painter.
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