| This study examines Homer's mature, Prout's Neck phase by re-examining the premise he was isolated, in every sense of the word, from the mainstream American art world of the 1880s and 1890s. It argues that in these decades Homer in fact accommodated some leading critical theories of the day, not least because of an artistic evolution or development that late nineteenth century critics who shaped his reputation and enduring image equated with progress.;The study is divided into three parts, the first of which attempts to pinpoint essential critical issues of the 1880s and 1890s---issues that of course affected interpretation of Homer's work---by examining the writing and philosophical sources of a few leading critics of the era. The second section of the dissertation evaluates several of Homer's well-known oils of the 1880s in light of ideas discussed in the opening chapters and attempts in particular to illuminate Homer's dialogue with a mainstream American an world that then favored monumental figure painting. A motif recently imported from Europe by the numerous younger American artists who had studied there, its appearance in Homer's art signaled, it is argued, his progress to artistic adulthood.;The final section of this study discusses the marines without figures Homer painted in the 1890s, works that late nineteenth century critics considered his greatest achievement of all. It argues that early critics admired these images of pure nature on aesthetic grounds, regarding them as synthetic, modern, individual and national, in short distinguished by just the attributes they were looking for in American art. At the same time, it is proposed, late nineteenth century critics also prized Homer's pure marines because they saw these non-narrative paintings as evidencing the final stage of a systematic, even deterministic progress they believed Homer had sustained throughout his career.;It would have been significant, it is argued, that Homer's culminating works emerged away from New York and its influences and instead through his apparently intense, individual response to the nature of a regional American locale. For Homer's last burst of progress occurred when critics had become disillusioned about the impact widespread European training was having on American art and about the slow pace at which younger American artists were converting the lessons of that training into expression that was individual and national---characteristics they found in the work of the older, non-European trained Homer. In light of this, it is argued, critics may have believed that Homer's final flowering through an empirical response to nature set an example for younger compatriots, something that would mean this purportedly exceptional figure within late nineteenth century American art may actually have become something of a paradigmatic one. |
