Turquoise waters, bright sun, brown skin—rendered in a watercolor technique newly free and vibrant, using the white of the paper to set off colors already saturated with light, so that the images appear to glow from within. The Met’s selection of these fragile and rarely shown works suggests not only summery breezes but also the human warmth and interest so increasingly absent from the ocean scenes back home. Yet, to judge by the catalogue that forms the permanent record of this show, the beauty of these works is a significant problem. Although slavery ended in the Bahamas in the eighteen-thirties, in Homer’s era it was a British colony with a racially brutal economic system, akin to sharecropping in America. Tourism, a means of income for the British governor, was just gearing up, and Homer, who published some of these scenes as illustrations in a “touristic article,” in 1887, is in the dock.
She continues:
“He seemed entirely comfortable with colonialist stereotypes of Caribbean islands as exotic idylls,” the historian Daniel Immerwahr writes. True, he admits, Homer depicts hurricanes hitting the islands, and the works have “variation and nuance,” but the weather he shows is too often bright, the people too consistently healthy. We see Black men wresting a living from the beautiful waters, but not “the harsh economics of colonialism” that impels them. Nor do we see any “indictment” of “U.S. colonialism,” which did not in fact exist in the places Homer knew: the Bahamas remained British until independence, Bermuda is still a British territory, and the U.S. takeover of Cuba followed his visit by some thirteen years. Beyond the Atlantic, the artist is censured for failing to depict the murderous violence of the U.S. war of conquest in the Philippines—about which Immerwahr has written elsewhere with effectiveness—and a reader might easily fail to realize that Homer was never in the Philippines. No matter. An illustration of the violence appeared on the cover of Life. The artist could have—should have—painted such a scene. Instead, he spent the years when the war was taking place (1899-1902) making works so enticing they amounted to “an invitation to empire.”
Of Herdrich’s allegation, Pierpont says,
A debt is owed to the co-curator Stephanie L. Herdrich for conceiving this show. So it is even more perplexing, in terms of the triumph of presupposition, when she writes, of the Bahamas watercolors, “He focused on the quotidian lives of the island’s Black inhabitants and uncritically acknowledged the rigid stratification of Bahamian society.” Uncritically? The statement would be perfectly accurate were it not for this inexplicable word, which contradicts the content of several of the works on the museum’s walls, and even some of Herdrich’s descriptions of them. “A Garden in Nassau,” for example, of 1885, in which a small Black child stands on a dusty road, looking up toward a tall, closed gate in a whitewashed wall, forcefully excluded from the lush growth of palms and flowers on the other side. (We know that Homer originally painted and then erased two figures climbing the wall to pick a coconut, increasing the poignance of the lone child.) Or “Native Hut at Nassau,” of the same year, with a group of Black children staring from the doorway of a poor hut in a hardscrabble yard; Cross, whose perception of the artist’s intent is more generous, sees him as “eager to understand the lives they lived within these houses.” Or “A Wall, Nassau,” of 1898, showing the same sort of whitewashed wall with cultivated plantings behind it, and jagged shards of glass along the top to keep the unwanted out. Needless to say—or is it?—these images are not exotic idylls and are far from uncritical of the racial status quo.
That is well said. Case dismissed.
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| Winslow Homer, A Garden in Nassau (1885) |
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