“There is certainly some strange power that has some overlook on me & directing my life,” Winslow Homer wrote in a letter to his brother late in his life. “That I am in the right place at present there is no doubt.” In Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place at the Portland Museum of Art, Homer’s art appears as a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and an agricultural and modern industrial America. These works acted as real-time documents of changing times and perceptions of place and continue to reveal today essential truths of time and space in the process of America becoming the America we knew and know. Homer becomes the pictorial poet of change—a man at the right place and time with the right talents to express the essence of both. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Right Place and Time."
[Image: Winslow Homer. Sharpshooter. 1863. Oil on canvas, 12 ¼ x 16 ½ in. Signed lower left: W. Homer 63. Gift of Barbro and Bernard Osher 1992.41.]
[Many thanks to the Portland Museum of Art for providing me with the image above and a review copy of the catalogue to Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place, which runs through September 6, 2010.]
