Bodies of water: Winslow Homer's paintings of the sea /shore

This thesis studies Winslow Homer's paintings of the sea/shore from 1869 to 1909. I examine transformations in these works in both subject and style as they move from coastal genre scenes to pure seascape. Looking at Homer's ways of framing the sea and populating its shores, I read the modifications in his seascapes as indices to the painter's personal anxieties as an artist. From his early seaside images of bourgeois women and youths to his 1880s scenes of laboring fisherfolk, Homer expressed vexed affinities to his subjects. During the last twenty years of his life, he produced a number of marines, which conveyed both a growing sense of his own mortality and Homer's intimate knowledge of the coast near his studio-home in Maine. These sea-paintings proclaim the ultimate anxieties of a late nineteenth-century artist who struggled to resolve contradictions involving realist illusion and modernist sensibilities regarding the physical reality of paint on canvas.;Scholars have repeatedly offered explanatory genealogies for Homer's final seascapes. The pivotal event for these scholars has always been Homer's trip to the English fishing village of Cullercoats in the early 1880s. The obvious impact of his English sojourn on Homer's work notwithstanding, I argue that more truly critical changes in the artist's oeuvre actually occurred later, in 1890, after Homer's four year hiatus from oil painting. In 1890, when Homer resumed work in oils, he embarked on the production of thirty-some dramatic coastal scenes known as his "pure marines." Despite the apparent emphasis of the "pure marines" on nature, the late seascapes retain Homer's earlier fascination with the sea/shore as metaphor for the social; thus, I also examine the late works in relation to broader cultural changes in post-bellum America.;I contend that Homer's late marines are embedded within a complex discursivity resulting from two decades of radical socio-economic alteration in America and that the seascapes must be read for what they tell us about as military sea power, changing concepts of public and private time, and fin-de-siecle problems concerning representation---all subjects with affinities to death. The artist's awareness of his own mortality and the limitations of his medium imbue these works with a physical intimacy that Homer sought to deny by asking that the paintings be viewed at a distance. This study considers the multiplicity of meanings offered by a close examination of Homer's carefully crafted portrayals of the sea/shore.