cause we can paint and because we have the
things to paint from. With a mountain and river scenery unrivalled on
the globe; with rock-bound coasts breaking the full surge of an ocean;
with forests of towering trees compared to which in girth and height
the trees of all other lands are but toothpicks; with plains ending in
films of blue haze and valleys sparkling with myriads of waterfalls;
with every type of the human race blended in our own, or distinct as
are the woodman of Maine and the soft-eyed mulatto of Louisiana; with
a history filled with traditions most romantic--Aztec, Indian, and
negro; with women who move like Greek goddesses and children whose
faces are divine, why go away from home to find something to paint?
Winslow Homer never did, and that's why his work will live when the
painters of Egyptian harems, Spanish dancers, and Dutch and Venetian
boats and palaces are forgotten.

To take a specific example or two, what subject, for instance, is more
worthy of a great master's brush than Homer's "Undertow," two
half-drowned young bathers locked in each other's arms, the two
beachmen dragging them clear of the mighty, blue-green wave curving
behind them? Here is a subject of almost weekly occurrence on our
coast. Who ever thought of painting it before? And that marvellous
picture of "The Cotton Pickers." This, to me, was the first clear
note Homer had sounded. The "Prisoners to the Front," painted just
after the war, was a strong, realistic picture, true and forceful in
color and composition, and, of course, admirable in drawing, but that
was all. It told its story at once, and having heard it to the end you
acknowledged its truth and went away content. But "The Cotton Pickers"
left something more in your mind. The gray dawn of the morning dimly
lighted up a field of cotton, the negro quarters on the horizon line;
dotted here and there, bending over the bolls, were groups of negroes,
singly and in pairs, filling their bags; in the foreground walked two
young negro girls, the foremost a dark mulatto--the whole story of
Southern slavery written in every line of her patient, uncomplaining
face.

This picture alone placed Homer in the first rank of American painters
of his day, and he has never lost this place, for not only was the
picture all it should be in composition and mass, but, unlike many of
Homer's pictures of an earlier period, it was deliciously gray and
cool in tone. It places him also in the front