|
The watercolor was at one time owned by one of the leading collectors of American art and subsequently by the American impressionist painter J. Alden Weir, from whom Duncan Phillips purchased it in 1918. Phillips hailed Rowing Home as an example of the best in modern art, and he delighted in comparing it with the style of ancient oriental compositions. Philips wrote, "Winslow Homer...was unconscious of pure aesthetic inscription when, instinctively, he laid on those suggestive darks over that luminous expanse … The ripples of water in the wake of the oars required a quick simplification of brush stroke. Quickly he wrote it down, just as he saw it. That is the modern as it differs from the ancient calligraphy."
|
