Northeaster, 1895, reworked by 1901
(Picture: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)Funny, isn’t it, how Britain can be so completely dominated by US popular culture, yet one of the best-known American painters is unknown here? That painter is Wilmslow Homer, and if you’ve never heard of him, neither, dear reader, had I. There was an exhibition of his marine paintings in the Dulwich Picture Gallery not long ago, but other than that, he’s unfamiliar.
Yet as this fascinating exhibition makes clear, there’s a lot to Homer, including an interesting take on England. Right now, he’s on the radar because of his paintings from the American Civil War, and his subsequent depictions of former slaves give an insight into the way emancipation worked out in human terms.
