Solitude,” wrote Emerson, “is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter which will bear it farther than suns and stars.” No one could have agreed with the essayist more keenly than his fellow New Englander Winslow Homer, whose studio and principal home for 27 years was not a gracious flat in a fashionable watering place, or a bohemian cottage in a teemingly social artists’ colony, but a plain made-over stable on a lonely promontory exposed to the wind and weather of the North Atlantic. Homer’s cabin, in Prouts Neck, Maine, was miles from a telegraph office or post office, and it lacked electricity and central heating. Shunned by less hardy souls, that remote locale was an inexhaustible paradise for the artist, who lived contentedly there until his death in 1910 at the age of 74.
In this forbidding spot he reached artistic maturity. The light, atmosphere, and topography of coastal Maine liberated his imagination, its harshness inspiring his greatest work. Such profound meditations on the power and peril of the sea as Eight Bells, Cannon Rock, Northeaster, Winter Coast, The West Wind, and Eastern Point, Prouts Neck—now touchstones of American art—were conceived and executed within the compass of Homer’s small peninsula.
Before settling in Maine, Homer had been a successful painter and illustrator, traveling up and down the eastern seaboard. He had emerged as a charming, wholesome limner of America at leisure. But as he neared middle age, recording such tranquil idylls no longer suited him. In 1880 he summered on an island in Gloucester Harbor, followed by a year and a half in England, in the fishing village of Cullercoats, near Tynemouth. Here he had his first glimpse of the everyday bravery of fishermen as they struggled to wrest a living from the sea.
Spurred by what he saw, Homer sailed home late in 1882. He cleaned out the New York studio he had most recently occupied and repaired to Prouts Neck, a fishing village his brother Arthur had discovered in 1874. Hoping to turn the area into a summer resort, Homer’s father and brothers were busy buying up available land. Despite the artist’s growing penchant for solitude, he attempted to lodge with his family, with predictable results. “Winslow spent his first summer with his brother Charles’s family,” explains Charles Willauer, the artist’s great-great-nephew and present owner of the studio. “He realized that the hubbub was too distracting, so he asked for the stable. He moved it a short distance away and hired John Calvin Stevens, a Portland architect, to remodel it.”
Homer wanted two workshoplike rooms on the ground floor and a second story consisting of an open loft and a covered balcony facing the coast. The long balcony was the only special request. On certain days it was a capital site for working; on others, he would pace its length, observing ships on the horizon and learning about the sea in all its moods and seasons. The downstairs, paneled in pine and furnished with a few tables, chairs, and benches, was closer to a sportsman’s camp built for a short vacation than to a year-round residence. Yet the very ruggedness of it all was balm and ballast to the artist’s spirit.
What Homer demanded first and foremost was uninterrupted time. Privacy, unfortunately, could be his only at the expense of hospitality and upholstered comfort. As an acclaimed artist, he was a target of the social lion hunters materializing on the Neck every summer. They disturbed Homer so severely that in self-protection he erected a battery of defenses, including signs reading, “Mr. Homer Is Not At Home” and “SNAKES SNAKES MICE!”
To the villagers who left the painter alone, unless he made an overture, a different personality was revealed. Stories of his generosity and forbearance abound, especially in cases of the local tradespeople, who would tell him how to correct his pictures.
Austere though it was, life on Prouts Neck was not without its amenities, for Homer was a fine cook and a connoisseur of food and drink. Another unexpected extravagance was clothing. Known for his natty dressing and proud of his trim figure, Homer ordered dozens of suits from Brooks Brothers. Strangers frequently mistook him for a stockbroker or coal baron.
When not at the easel, Homer read, cooked, hunted, fished, gardened, built roads, and fussed about sales and prices of his works. Although he appreciated the peacefulness of a bright afternoon, sunny days exasperated him because of their uselessness as motifs. But when the skies darkened, Homer ran for his boots and oilskins. The thick of a gale, the lash of the rain, the sea hurling itself against the ancient rocks elated him.
Out of this craggy, weatherbeaten world Homer hewed a powerful and highly original oeuvre and a life that bore out his own solid character. Of this he was fully cognizant. As he assured his brother, “The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment... The Sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.”