Ships in the Night
Footsteps behind each other, Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer are the spotlights of a major new exhibition at the Denver Art Museum
An intriguing little mystery lies buried at the heart of a major new exhibition at the Denver Art Museum: Did two of America’s greatest 19th-century artists and illustrators, Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer, ever meet? There is ample evidence, all circumstantial, that would seem to suggest they could have. Both artists lived in New York City and even frequented some of the same Manhattan venues, including the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League and M. Knoedler & Co. Gallery. Some of their separate haunts— including publishing companies, watering holes and studios—were often down the street or around the corner from each other. Both men were close friends with artist J. Alden Weir, with Homer even rooming with him for a year before Weir left for Paris. Both Remington and Homer exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago. Both men worked for Harper’s Weekly at various times in their careers. Their dates don’t always overlap, but it’s remarkable how many places they had in common—in several instances they were walking the same Manhattan sidewalks only a year apart.
The catalog for the exhibition introduces a tantalizing clue.“during the genesis of this project, one of the curators came across a photograph published in 1982 in Peggy and
Harold Samuels’ biography of Frederic Remington. Seated around a table, four artists play a hand of cards. One of them sits on the edge of his seat, pipe in mouth, while another leans to the left, hand on jowl, with a slightly bored expression.the caption identifies these two as Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer,” it reads in a foreword by three of the exhibition’s organizers. “We all wanted this image to be real, but we had our suspicions. Homer appears to have too much hair, and the age difference between the two artists seems off. Even so, we were excited at the slim prospect of having found a photograph proving that the two contemporaries and legends of American art knew each other and were card-playing friends, providing a thoroughly personal connection to this first-ever comparative look at their work.”
Unfortunately, dear reader, this story has no fulfilling ending.after researching the photograph, it was discovered that the original document was missing and “remains, in fact, unverifiable, its authenticity suspended.” “We did our best to track down and answer that ultimate question,” says co-curator Thomas Brent Smith, Denver Art Museum’s curator of Western American art and director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art.“whatever we did, wherever we turned, there was no smoking gun, like maybe a letter from Homer to Remington. I certainly think they knew of each other—they were handled by the same dealer in Knoedler, and you see the close proximity of their lives in Newyork. But as best we can tell they were like ships passing in the night.”
Proof of a Remington-homer encounter may never materialize—and, let’s be honest, there is poetry in not knowing—but the Denver Art Museum has something better: a conversation between the two artists through their works. Opening March 15 at the Colorado museum is Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington, a stunning new exhibition that explores the two artists and their trajectories through American art.the exhibition, which will also travel to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and the
Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Texas, will present some of the great masterpieces from the artists, including
A Dash for the Timber by Remington and many of Homer’s great Maine seascapes.
“The concept of an exhibition about Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington has been kicked around in one capacity or another for years and years and years now. I think all it took to come together was a group of curators to come together and say, ‘Let’s do it,’” Smith says, adding that the show is co-curated by Jennifer Henneman, his colleague at the Denver Art Museum; Diana Greenwold, associate curator of American art at the Portland Museum of Art; and Maggie Adler, curator at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.“what we ended up with was two Remington people, myself and Jennifer, and two Homer people, Diana and Maggie.we crossfired with each other and brought it all together.”
What will hit visitors first are the similarities between the two artists: both were illustrators first, both lived in New York, both spent time in or near the Adirondacks, and both covered war as correspondents for Harper’s Weekly and other publications. Homer painted the Civil War, while Remington created artwork related to the Spanish-american War in 1898, the Indian Wars, and even accompanied Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898. Both artists also leveraged this early training in illustration to propel them into legendary fine art careers that are celebrated in museums around the world still today.
“…[M]uch of what we know, or think we know, of Remington and Homer is oversimplified: far from being earnest witnesses to extremes of American experience, the Western frontier or the isolated rocky Maine shore, both enjoyed and pursued worldly careers marked by much shrewd mythmaking and commercial self-fashioning,” writes Adam Gopnik in an essay in the catalog.“so far from being the noble hermit-artists of the American wilderness that they, or their admirers, often cast them as, both Homer and Remington were more often neighbors of mine, New Yorkers, living and working in the metropolis and making their careers from astute alliances with cosmopolitan enterprises—not least the illustrated newspaper Harper’s Weekly, where both flourished as illustrators. they worked always, and unashamedly, with an eye to the market and a feeling for what sells.” The exhibition even opens with a pairing of works that demonstrate some of the similar themes they were exploring: Remington’s The Fall of the Cowboy, showing a cowboy rendered obsolete by a barbwire fence he’s passing through in a snowy landscape, and Homer’s The West Wind, which shows a woman gazing out into the vastness of the ocean, seemingly acknowledging her small place within the grand spaces of the shoreline.
“An analysis of Remington’s
The Fall of the Cowboy, 1895, and Homer’s The West Wind, 1891, in particular, complicates the standard characterization of these two artists,” Adler writes in the accompanying catalog, Homer | Remington. “One is an evocation of the West, the other an eastern scene. Completed just a few years apart, both are nearly monochrome and neither is actionpacked. they do not convey drama and vigor and are not replete with detailed information. Perhaps what is most fascinating about the two paintings is
their sense of judicious restraint.their veracity arises out of the authenticity of their sentiment, not the accurate transcription of facts.what they best accomplish is conveying sensation: the feeling of being there.”
Other comparisons have a more visual rhyming pattern, as with the case of Remington’s iconic Dash for the Timber, a huge 1889 oil showing a line of eight riders dramatically fleeing a group of Native Americans in the dust behind them, and Homer’s 1872 oil Snap the Whip, a work that shows a line of children playing a game outside a schoolhouse in a grassy field. Both works have similar compositions with their main figures in a row that runs across the painting, though the implications of what happens next ranges from playful innocence in Homer’s work to mortal danger in Remington’s. In both cases, though, it’s delightful to imagine the motion and movement of the feet—or hooves, which are often airborne in Remington’s work—as they rise and fall against the earth.the works seem to vibrate with energy.
Just when the Natural Forces starts to bring the two artists tightly together, it splits them off onto their own divergent paths.the big difference is purely time. Though they died only nine months apart—remington in 1909 and Homer in 1910—the artists came from adjacent generations, with Homer 26 years older than the younger artist.another difference is the way they looked at the world and the drama it created.while Remington often painted the desert and its inhabitants of cowboys, Native Americans and cavalry riders—and
Homer the sea, though he also painted soldiers, hunters and wildlife subjects— they took different points of views when it came to drama and conflict. “Homer and Remington would ultimately shed their illustrator beginnings and mature into skilled painters who at times treated the same universal themes, above all man’s relationship to nature,” Smith writes. “Whereas Homer’s works often express man confronting nature’s power, as in The Fog Warning, 1885, and Undertow, 1886, Remington regarded the wilderness as but a single hazard and man as perhaps a greater threat, an idea that is evident in his painting Ridden Down, 1905.Whether depicting a raging sea or the vast Western landscape, both artists seem to have returned repeatedly to such themes to explore their seemingly endless symbolic possibilities.”
It’s this back-and-forth dialogue between the two artists that makes the show so compelling in its pairing.they may have never met, but Remington and Homer shared ideas about the
American experience that seems to suggest they might have got along perfectly if they had.