WHAT DO THEY SEE IN WINSLOW HOMERS PAINTINGS?
Homer’s paintings produced effects of almost overwhelming immediacy, transporting the viewer in imagination to the very brink of the stony shore or into the very midst of heroic, dangerous toil. They were “refreshing” because they exerted a forceful impression of (5) the real. As Alfred Trumble wrote, the vividly rendered Winter Coast made one feel “the piercing cold, the tremor of the earth under the shock of the sea,” and hear “through the long thunder of the surf rolling down the shore, like cannons on a line of battle, the bitter piping of the blast.” At the same time, Homer’s paintings performed (10) equally powerful metaphorical operations. Standing in the spray of a huge breaker on a splintery, sloping ledge, the lone hunter in Winte Coast, totally immersed in the natural world, undergoes a baptism of the elements. Mentally stepping into the picture, the viewer could let those cold, clean waves perform the same purifying action. (15) Weatherbeaten, empty of organic life, permitt
