Boston Globe, May 2, 1999

Winslow Homer in Prouts Neck, Maine

The floorboards of Winslow Homer's second-floor porch creak with every step, like the sound of a boat rubbing against the side of a dock. Indeed, this studio perched on the tip of Prout's Neck, Maine, was Winslow Homer's ship; the well-trodden porch, the bow where the renowned artist could view the entire length of the Neck's boulder-strewn coastline, the battering surf of the northern Atlantic, and the merciless Maine climate, complete with dense fog and forceful gales. Here, nature provided the tense drama between sea and shoreline. All this brilliant pictorial storyteller had to do was wait patiently, sketchbook in hand, for the weather to take a turn for the worse. Perhaps, it would be a sudden squall, thrusting the waves against the wall of rock and then upward twenty to thirty feet in the air like a geyser of water shot from a whale's blowhole. Or, better yet, a battle of man versus nature-a fisherman desperately trying to reach shore to escape the rough seas only to find his small dinghy stuck on the rocky outcroppings as the angry waves bathe him in salt.

Homer waited, "wearing out the balcony," his brothers would say, for that often unfortunate, yet very real conflict. Although two houses now obstruct the view to the east, the scene to the west and straight ahead to the south have changed little since Homer's presence on these shores. The exclusive home of his father and oldest brother, Charles, called The Ark, still stands to the right of the studio. Juniper trees, planted by Winslow, slope down from his backyard to the moors, eventually reaching the jagged Maine gray rock that lines most of the Neck's shoreline, detritus that remains from a glacier retreating more than 10,000 years ago. Geologists call it a drowned coastline. Then there's the great expanse of ocean where, in the distance, a mile or two out to sea, stand Bluff and Stratten Islands.

I chose to visit Prout's Neck in autumn, a time that Winslow Homer cherished and produced his greatest work. The halcyon days of summer, when the sun beat down on the calm waters of the Atlantic had very little appeal to Homer. On one such day he spoke of the ocean disdainfully as "that duck pond down there." In Prout's Neck, he chose to concentrate on the perils of the sea. He would often work well into November and December, the time of year when waves come crashing out of the ocean to hurl themselves against the cliffs.

It is these wrenching yet very real images of Prout's Neck that set the groundwork for Homer's best works. Homer had seen Prout's Neck once before, in 1875, to visit his brother Arthur, who was honeymooning at a resort here. When he returned in 1883, from a stint in Tynemouth, England, he would make this small spit of land his primary residence until his death in 1910.

As soon as I turned onto Black Point Road, the main thoroughfare into Prout's Neck, I could understand why Homer was so enraptured with this small peninsula. To my right were glimpses of Saco Bay and the hotels that line Old Orchard Beach in the distance. Past a small yacht club, the road took an abrupt ninety degree turn to the left and there in front of me stood the wide-open Atlantic. Whitecap after whitecap came crashing into the rocks as if they were marching to their death.

My guide around the Neck on this frigid November day was Doris Homer, the 86 year-old wife of Winslow's nephew, Charles Lloyd Homer. Within moments of meeting her at her house, she drove me a short distance down Winslow Homer Road to Number Five. A small white sign in iron letters stating "Homer, The Studio" confirmed this simple structure's legacy. Inside, I walked through a kitchen, once Homer's bathroom, and entered his living room. Prints lined the walls but nothing was original except for two watercolors done by his mother and a portrait of Homer created by a young woman who befriended the artist in his later years. Evidently, she ran out of paint and knocked on Homer's door to ask if she could borrow some tubes from him. Homer obliged and shortly thereafter he asked her to draw this portrait of himself for a fee of five gold coins. His mother's watercolors depict a vase of flowers and, not coincidentally, a group of fishermen out to sea. Other intriguing relics in the room include Homer's brush and paint under a plate of glass.

None of these items except, of course, his paint and brushes were here during Homer's stay. Most of the furniture, prints, and other items seen today were planted here by his brother Charles to give the place an aura of how an artist's studio should look. Indeed, by the time Homer died, several of his works were already on display at such major museums as the Museum of Fine Arts and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was becoming famous and people were starting to arrive in significant numbers to transform his studio into something of a shrine.

Although this facade continues to delight visitors, these adornments can't hide the fact that Homer chose to live in monastic conditions. His studio was almost barren. The only furniture he had were four incredibly uncomfortable hickory chairs, a tip-top table, and, in the adjoining painting room, a rustic settle. His bedroom was furnished with a small bed, pot-bellied stove, washstand, and another wooden chair. Homer's only decorations were fishing and hunting paraphernalia, including a birchbark canoe he had brought back from Canada.

Even the studio, a plain frame building with a square mansard roof, had humble beginnings. It was formerly Charles' stable in the back of the Ark. When the family first learned that Winslow was planning to reside permanently in Prout's Neck, they hired a builder to construct a painting room in the rear of the Ark. Valuing his privacy, Homer refused to work or live in the Ark and asked for the stable instead. Charles agreed and hired an architect to remodel and move the structure to where it's currently standing.

Doris Homer led me from the living room to the painting room, also known as "The Factory." Homer had this room added on to the studio several years after he moved to the Neck. When the weather outside prohibited him from painting plein-air, he would retreat to this room to put the finishing touches on a piece of art. Yet, while the studio felt warm, even now in these cooler months, this room is dimly lit and must have been a deterrent from Homer working inside. Very little natural light enters through the windows and Homer only had two kerosene lamps at his disposal. Thus, at every opportunity, he would be outside, painting on his porch or sketching on the cliffs.

An easel Homer used still stands in the room along with a fishing hat he wore known as a sou'wester. This hat can be seen on the heads of many of the fishermen he portrayed, most notably the two men in his epic painting, Eight Bells (1886). On another wall hangs a boldly lettered sign that reads: SNAKES! MICE! Homer made this placard to discourage "the damned old women," his reference to the elderly summer visitors, from disturbing him while he painted on the cliffs. Like many talented creative minds, Homer was incredibly focused when he sat down to paint. Even the slightest interruption would drive him mad. He valued his privacy so dearly that he developed a set of identifying signals for his family to use when he was working inside the studio. "As a child, my husband would rap twice on the door quickly," says Doris. "If Winslow heard a knock that was not in code, he rarely answered his door, especially if he was working."

Later in life, Homer would develop a reputation as a hermit, even a misanthrope, mostly because he refused to converse with the summer visitors. He was one of the few artists who found fame in his lifetime yet might have enjoyed a posthumous success in order to preserve his privacy. At the turn-of-the-century, autograph seekers, journalists, art students, even female admirers began to hound Homer. He started to take trips away from Prout's Neck in the summer to avoid the incessant badgering.

"Follow me," said the agile octogenarian as we strolled down the stairs and out the door. An arctic gust kissed my cheeks as I walked past the juniper trees to the rocky shoreline Homer knew so well. It was a blustery 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside with a windchill factor well into the negative numbers, but I was too excited to be concerned about the weather. There in front of me, several feet from the cliffs, stood the rocks Homer painted in A Summer Squall (1904), the first of many rock formations I would find that day that the painter captured in his work. Waves washed over the large rock in the center, several yards away from where Homer would often fish for tautog.

I was standing on a well-worn path, part of the mile-long Cliff Walk created by Charles in 1879. It was at that time, when the Homers were developing the Neck, that a broad marginal way was formed around the perimeter to preserve the most scenic part of the peninsula. This area would be accessible to all land owners. Even to this day, with the onslaught of construction, the Prouts Neck Association has kept this area free of all houses. The public is welcome to take the same walk Winslow Homer took almost every morning at 4:30 a.m. with his dog, Sam, a white wire-haired terrier. Often these strolls would be exploratory, a research gathering expedition for Homer to learn more about the rocky coastline and how waves, wind, and shore interact. Ever so slowly, he came to know every rock, cliff, and bush on this varied shore and how they responded to the tumultuous Maine weather.

Doris pointed out many of the other well-known rock formations seen in Homer's seascapes before leaving me on my merry way. She's a native Mainer who knows when to brave the elements and when to leave her foolish company behind.

With the sounds of waves ringing in my ears, I walked to the western part of the Neck, around the back of the Ark. Bay, juniper, and huckleberry bushes lined the Cliff Walk, dwarfed by the perennial blast of wind. The Ark has not been owned by a Homer for more than 50 years. The path ends at a small cul-de-sac, but I proceeded down to the shoreline behind 3 Checkley Point where I found the spot Homer painted Sunset, Saco Bay (1896). This is Prout's Neck at its tamest. Here, the ledges gently slope up from Saco Bay, creating a natural platform where Homer could easily pose the two women seen in the painting.

From Checkley Point, I retraced my steps back past Homer's studio to a spot on the coast behind the second house to the east. Called Cannon Rock, the formation here resembles a small cannon that juts out of the cliffside. Doris had pointed these rocks out to me, but it was far easier finding this location by listening rather than searching for this obscured symbol. It is one of the loudest and most ominous points on the Neck. Waves slam into the rocks and then flush down a foamy whirlpool back to sea as Homer clearly depicts in Cannon Rock (1895). Like most of Homer's seascapes, the rocks in this painting are not an exact replica of the rocks on the shoreline. Homer often stated "that he painted the world as it was," yet one visit to Prout's Neck will prove him false. Homer used his artistic license to emphasize, eliminate, simplify, and thus manipulate the elements for the sake of design.

Continuing eastward, the Cliff Walk begins to climb, eventually reaching an old stone tower called Seagate Tower. Here, the striated cliffs tower above the sea, offering exquisite views of the entire Neck. Homer aptly called this point High Cliff as seen in High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894). This is the most dramatic section of shoreline, where breakers roll in with tremendous force against a wall of rock, sending white froth every which way. As I took off my mittens to scribble down notes, only to find my chapped hands freezing within moments, I marveled at how Homer could possibly sketch in such a treacherous climate. I wonder how many of his drawings were blown away by these chilling winds and swallowed up by the sea?

The Cliff Walk gradually descends, crossing over a small wooden bridge to reach an area known as Kettle Cove. This shallow bay is home to hundreds of boulders. Homer loved this section of the Neck so much that he built a house "to die in" at 31 Winslow Homer Road, just north of the Cove. It was Kettle Cove where he had made his first drawing of Prouts Neck (The Honeymoon of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur B. Homer, 1875) and where, in 1909, Homer would create his final painting, Driftwood. Here, in his recurring theme of man facing the elements, a fisherman dressed in oilskins and a sou'wester hat struggles with a huge log in a storm. When Homer finished this work, he deliberately messed up his palette and hung it on the wall of his studio. This was his way of retiring.

Shivering and wishing for the halcyon days of summer, I somehow made it to Eastern Point, the final stop on the Cliff Walk, at the end of a rocky beach. Just offshore, a blackened ledge simply called Black Rock, stands firm against the perpetual battering of surf. In one of his most famous paintings of the 1900s, Eastern Point, Prouts Neck (1900), Homer shows a churning wave shooting upward from Black Rock, practically touching the top of the canvas. When Homer painted this picture he had just purchased this land from his brother, Arthur, becoming one of the few artists to actually own the subject of their work.

In the distance stood Richmond Island, just off Cape Elizabeth, and to my left was Prout's Neck and Scarboro Beaches, two popular stretches of sand in the summer time. Behind the beaches are bathhouses that Homer built for the people of the Neck. Yes, it was Homer, the so-called ill-mannered hermit, who donated these structures to the people of the Neck purely as an altruistic gesture. Homer never swam or even lied down on the beach. Remarkably, with all his love for the ocean, he never even owned a boat at Prout's Neck. In fact, he rarely sailed, only on occasion with his brother Arthur. Thus, his interests in boats were merely pictorial, the exception being the canoes he owned to fish in the rivers of the Adirondacks or Canada.

Fleeing the harsh Atlantic, I continued my tour of the Neck inland on Winslow Homer Road, passing his house at 31 Winslow Homer Road. Across from 25 Winslow Homer Road, I turned right at a small trail sign that read, "P.N.A. Sanctuary." Not only did Charles donate the Cliff Walk to the people of the Neck, but also he gave about 15 acres of forest to provide a park for its residents. I took the Center Path into the woods and within moments I was far away from the angry ocean deep in a forest of old growth pines. I sat down on an uprooted tree trunk, now a primitive bench, and watched a group of white-crowned sparrows playing on one of the branches. Less than 100 yards away from the ongoing saga of sea versus shore, these birds were calmly singing, happy, like me, to find this place of refuge. Homer would often come to the Sanctuary to finish the paintings of hunters and other rugged outdoorsmen he started in the wilderness of the Adirondacks or Canada.

Back in the relative warmth of Homer's studio, staring once again at the artist's portrait, I realized that Homer could have easily inserted himself as fisherman or wilderness guide into any of his paintings. A born naturalist with a wizened face that endured every facet of inclement weather known to man, Homer looks very much like the hardy men he often portrayed. He certainly had the same fondness for the outdoors. He felt an absolute compulsion to paint the sea in its myriad moods, vividly expressing both the power and the tragic beauty of the northern Atlantic and its dire effects on the men who inhabited its shores. Homer biographer Lloyd Goodrich said it best when he wrote, "Winslow Homer embodied the affirmative elements of the American spirit as no preceding artist had. He did for our painting what Walt Whitman did for our poetry—he made it native to our own earth and water."