TELLING STORIES.(Winslow Homer's painting)

Winslow Homer's first oil painting, which he made in 1863, when he was a twenty-six-year-old freelancer illustrating Civil War scenes for Harper's Weekly, shows a Union sharpshooter in a tree, balancing a rifle for an imminent shot. The man's perch is precarious. His concentration is total. Nature--soft tufts of dusky foliage, scraps of yellowish sky--attends indifferently. Decades later, Homer recalled having peered at a man through the telescopic sight of a sharpshooter's weapon. The impression, he wrote in a letter, "struck me as being as near murder as anything I could think of in connection with the army & I always had a horror of that branch of the service." This compunction, which I encountered in a text accompanying an engraving of the same subject in a current show at the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C., of about fifty Homers from the museum's collection, surprises me not for its content but because I don't think of the extraordinarily stolid Homer as having opinions. (The sole quote from him that sticks in my mind is a bit of advice to seascape painters: "Never put more than two waves in a picture; it's fussy." Somehow, words to live by.) Certainly, nothing like horror inflects "The Sharpshooter on Picket Duty," which mainly conveys professional competence. The soldier, with one booted foot athletically braced in a crook of the tree and the other dangling, and grasping a branch on which his gun rests, is all business. The engraved version differs from the painting in one extra detail--a canteen hanging in the tree, indicating a lengthy stay for the sniper at his post. By excluding the canteen, the beginner painter demonstrated an instinct for the difference between reportage and art, even as he maintained an emotional detachment, basic to reporting, that would distinguish him as a great and, particularly, an American artist--ever the undistracted sharpshooter.

Homer keeps getting better, as I've had repeated occasions to notice since responding ambivalently to a major travelling retrospective that opened at the National Gallery in 1995. I was in the right bad mood, at the time, to tax the artist with a spiritual tedium of Victorian-era Yankee culture, which he served doggedly with genre pictures ranging from homesick soldiers to ladies playing croquet to slickered fishermen braving squalls. Partly, I was reacting against publicity for the show which characterized Homer as "America's greatest and most national painter," and not only because it dismissed Jackson Pollock. A Midwesterner myself, I questioned the "national" bona fides of visions of native nature confined to the Atlantic coast and the Adirondacks. And then there was Homer's sexlessness. Undoubtedly heterosexual, he was a washout at romance--no amorous Walt Whitman or even the intriguingly neurotic Thomas Eakins but "a quiet little fellow," in the words of a friend--numb to personal magnetism, female or male, and with a pronounced distaste for bodies except in action. In my judgment of the retrospective, I did make exceptions for Homer's watercolors, whose translucency coaxed fully sensuous expressiveness from him, and for some late paintings of crashing waves that with their exactly measured, explosive force outdo Friedrich, Courbet, and even Turner. But I was perversely clenched against enjoying the key aspect of Homer's talent, which is based in his early discipline as an illustrator: a prehensile feel for the iconic--the identification of a subject with its representation, such that, in memory, one becomes inseparable from the other. My punishment, ever since, has been to undergo shocks of chastened veneration whenever I happen upon his masterpieces.

Homer was born in Boston in 1836, the middle son of a hardware merchant who, in 1849, went bust in the gold rush. At the age of eighteen, Homer was apprenticed at a lithography shop. Thereafter, he freelanced while studying art in schools and on his own. In 1860, acquiring a copy of the French scientist M. ...