While the others were trying to make a little American Barbizon of
their own, there were Homer, Ryder, Fuller, Martin, working alone for
such vastly opposite ideas, and yet, of these men, four of them were
expressing such highly imaginative ideas, and Homer was the
unflinching realist among them. I do not know where Homer started, but
I believe it was the sea at Prout's Neck that taught him most. I think
that William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston must have seemed like
infant Michelangelos then, for there is still about them a sturdiness
which we see little of in the American art of that time, or even now
for that matter. They had a certain massive substance, proving the
force of mind and personality which was theirs, and while these men
were proving the abundance and warmth of themselves, Homer was the
frozen one among them. Nature was nature to him, and that alone he
realized, and yet it was not precisely slavish imitation that impelled
him.

There was in him a very creditable sense of selection,--as will be
seen especially in the water colours, so original with him, so gifted
in their power of treatment--one of the few great masters of the
medium the world has known. He knew the meaning of wash as few since
have known it, he knew that it has scale and limitation of its own,
and for all that, infinite suggestibility. Not Turner or Whistler have
excelled him, and I do not know of anyone who has equalled him in
understanding of this medium outside of Dodge Macknight and John
Marin. It is in these so expressive paintings on paper that you feel
the real esthetic longing as well as a certain contribution in Homer,
the desire to realize himself and to release himself from too slavish
imitation of nature and the too rigid consideration of truth. He was
finer in technique than perhaps any that I have mentioned, though the
two modern men have seconded him very closely, and in point of vision
have, I am certain, surpassed him. Homer arrived because of his power
to express what he wished to say, though his reach was far less lofty
than theirs. He was essentially on the ground, and wanted to paint the
very grip of his own feet on the rocks. He wanted the inevitability
put down in recognizable form. He had not feeling for the hint or the
suggestion until he came to the water-color, which is of course most
essentially that sort of medium. He knew its scope and its limitations
and never stepped out of its boundaries, and he achi