In the scope of a career that lasted more than five decades, Winslow Homer’s time in Gloucester amounts to something of an interlude. The artist spent the summers of 1873 and 1880 living and working in the bustling seaport, which sits some 30 miles north of Boston on the rocky coast of Massachusetts. However brief, these periods left a profound impression on Homer’s career, marked as they are by radical developments in his practice and technique, particularly in the medium of watercolor. They stand at the threshold of his emergence as a mature painter capturing the force and drama of the sea.

Before “Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor” opened at the MFA, I spoke with Ross Barrett, director of Graduate Studies and associate professor of American Art at Boston University, to better understand how these two trips to Gloucester forever changed Homer’s art and continue to impact his legacy. During our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, we discussed a wide range of topics, including Homer’s restless experimentation with watercolor, the theme of boys at play in his work, his relationship with the fishing community of Gloucester, and his shrewd mind for marketing his paintings.

Where is Homer, both in his life and career, when he embarks on his first trip to Gloucester in 1873?

It’s a transitional moment for Homer. He had found success early on painting Civil War subjects and designing scenes that could be adapted for publication in Harper’s Weekly. In the late 1860s and early ’70s, he was looking for new subjects. He was interested in portraying life after the war and Americans getting back to their lives. He had painted country subjects, rural kids, and families. He had also painted veterans, like in The Veteran in a New Field (1865), a great picture of a Union soldier picking up his agricultural duties after the war. He had also become interested in the coast, working in places like Long Branch, New Jersey. It’s generally a moment of exploration. He’s trying out new subjects and thinking about what life in the United States, and the North in particular, is like after the war.

That summer feels like a big moment for him and his work. What changed?

Over the course of the summer, as part of his interest in exploring new subjects and thinking about everyday life, he makes paintings of families, especially women and children, on or near Gloucester Harbor. Previously he had been interested in kids out in the country, so it makes sense that he continues painting children.

His scenes of childhood from that summer run the gamut emotionally. Some of them are cheerful and center on little moments of play and fun. He paints a group of boys having a clambake, for example, or kids playing with model boats. Scenes of innocence. But he also experiments with more somber subjects, moments where kids—and families more generally—are waiting, watching, hoping for the return of the fishing fleet, which, of course, was so important to Gloucester’s economy. There’s a watercolor, Waiting for Dad (1873), I think of as a great example: a little boy perched on a dory looking out to sea. The scene is filled with a kind of tension and ambiguity, and a sobriety that some of the other lighthearted scenes don’t have. He’s focusing on pictures of children and experimenting with different kinds of emotion in those images.

He begins to paint with watercolor seriously for the first time. How does his use of the medium develop and grow?

Homer’s mother, Henrietta, was an accomplished watercolorist, so he had had exposure to the medium before. At that time, it was a medium taking on new meaning: historically watercolor had been associated with amateur women artists, but in the 1870s white male professional artists were beginning to take it up, and critics and aesthetic thinkers were seeing it in new ways. Homer’s exploration of the medium is part of that shift. It’s also building on his familiarity with the medium that he got from his mom.

Most of his watercolors from that summer are highly finished. They’re filled with visual information. Over pencil and gouache, he’s using fine strokes of opaque pigment to really pick out the details of Gloucester’s shorelines and the objects that these kids are interacting with. That would change over time, but initially his pictures are really detailed.

Is there a connection between Homer’s early watercolors and his career as a commercial illustrator?

Absolutely. Homer had been working as an illustrator since the late 1850s and made a name for himself with these interesting, narrative, highly detailed scenes of everyday life during the Civil War. He continues working as an illustrator, supporting himself that way, in the 1870s.

A lot of the watercolors he’s making in Gloucester are preparatory images. He makes them with the thought that they can be translated as wood engravings for Harper’s Weekly, and he also sells a lot of them independently, so he’s trying to hit two markets.

He would change and alter them pretty dramatically as they shifted between media or formats. His watercolors are often compositionally simpler, more open ended in terms of narrative or story, and maybe sometimes more sober. Then, as they get translated into illustrations for Harper’s, oftentimes they become much less ambiguous. He adds figures and little vignettes. Either Homer or the editors at Harper’s often resolve some of the narrative ambiguities, either by giving images new titles that are much less ambiguous, or sometimes by publishing them alongside poems that give a sentimental charge.

Waiting for Dad changes: Homer adds a teenage girl holding a toddler at the right side of the scene. It fills it out a bit. In the original watercolor, it’s much less clear who this boy is. There are more ways to read him. In the Harper’s image it’s clear he’s part of a family, and that whole family is awaiting the return of a fisherman.

As you’ve mentioned, boys are not a new subject matter for Homer at this point—I think of Snap the Whip (1872)—and they aren’t particularly novel in American culture at the time; Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are prime examples. These boys, especially as Homer depicts them, are in most cases by themselves, without a parental figure around. Why was Homer so fixated on children and boys as a subject matter?

Homer was a very canny marketer. He knew how to make pictures that appealed to audiences with diverging perspectives. On the one hand, yes, it’s in keeping with the broader postwar cultural fascination with kids, adolescence, and youthful adventure—as epitomized by Mark Twain, but also in pictures by Eastman Johnson or even John George Brown. In part, Homer knew that representations of kids would sell because there was a good body of middle-class viewers interested in that subject. But I think he also saw portraying kids around the waterfront, alone or unsupervised, as was a way to produce images that meditated on the aftermath of the war in the broadest sense. More locally, in Gloucester, these scenes gave him a way to engage with the costs, the difficulties, and the hardships associated with the fishing industry.

The images can be nostalgic, even sentimental, but you also sense a deeper meaning underneath them, given what we know about how dangerous the fishing trade is and the absence of adults in most scenes.

Yeah, and I’ll just say: both of his visits either corresponded with or came on the heels of terrible tragedies that hit the Gloucester fishing business. There’s a hurricane in August 1873, when he’s there, and there’s a terrible storm in February 1879, just before he comes back. In both cases he’s in Gloucester as the community is dealing with the sudden loss of men. Families are grieving, but they’re also trying to stay afloat economically. Homer’s paintings engage that culture of difficulty, of hardship, of trauma, and of loss.

Can you talk about Homer’s relationship with Gloucester and the community there?

He’s more enmeshed in the town’s social life during the first trip. He stays downtown at a midrange hotel, the Atlantic House, which was popular with tourists. He interacts with these folks every day and is well received.

Homer was always attracted to eccentrics, to working people, to people on the margins of whatever community he was in. That would definitely be the case later, in Prouts Neck, Maine, and places like that, but it’s happening in Gloucester, too. In 1873 he meets a local fisherman, Oliver Ingersoll, who’s an eccentric guy that lives on an old ship. Homer gets to know him and spends time with him. So he’s plugged into social life there on different levels, interacting with middle-class people and getting to know some of the fishermen who are hanging around and are characters in the local landscape.

When Homer returns to Gloucester seven years later, a lot has changed—in the country but also for him, as an artist and personally.

By the beginning of the 1880s, Homer has found his footing as a painter. He’s better established as a professional working in that medium, and he’s leaving the illustration world behind. He has already traveled a fair amount. In between the Gloucester visits he goes to Virginia, spends time in the South, and portrays African American life there. He’s thinking about the larger shifts that are happening in the country as Reconstruction unwinds and then ends.

The country itself had gone through a pretty lengthy financial downturn, starting in 1873 and lasting through early 1879. It’s a time of economic and social turbulence. It’s also a time of resurgent nationalism. The Centennial Exposition is held in Philadelphia in 1876, which Homer participates in. It’s a mixed time, with the end of Reconstruction, with financial panic, with the shifting of race relations in both the South and the North, with class unrest, and with a resurgence of patriotism, or a certain kind of discourse of nationalism. All of that’s happening, and Homer’s interested in a lot of it. Meanwhile his career is shifting, as he moves away from graphic arts and focuses on oil and watercolor painting.

He’s more prolific during that second summer, painting 100 or so watercolors in about three months, which averages out to more than one a day. Do we know what accounted for this boost in productivity?

His productivity in the summer of 1880 is at least partly market driven. With the shift away from graphic arts, he’s not precarious financially, but his previous relationship with Harper’s Weekly was sustaining. It allowed him to experiment with oil and watercolor in the decades prior. Now he has to find ways to get a steady living, to keep afloat financially. He has the idea that he’ll crank out pictures that can be sold in Boston or New York to his growing body of collectors. That’s one way to think of that productivity, but I also think he’s more and more interested in the medium and experimenting with what it can do.

Speaking of the medium, it’s clear to see Homer experimenting with different techniques this time around. What changes do you see between the watercolors from his first trip and now?

There’s a pretty broad shift in style, from a finished, meticulous, detailed approach to one that’s much looser and more fluid in its pictorial structure. He’s less concerned with old-fashioned compositional armatures. He’s experimenting with new ways of applying pigment, letting paint soak into paper, blotting it out, laying it on in thick opaque dashes. It’s a much freer and even quasi-abstract approach that he begins to develop that summer.

Some of the sunset paintings that he makes are just incredible formally. I love those, and I think they epitomize this new style, these new experiments he’s undertaking. They have these really bold juxtapositions of color, and they lose all the meticulous gouache highlighting and pencil lines that you see in the earlier images. They’re much freer and the really push the limits of representation, some of those images.

Is he painting more in plein air at the time?

It’s a mix on both visits, though he experiments a bit more with out-of-doors painting the second time. That’s facilitated in part by where he’s staying. He’s not in a hotel anymore; he’s in the middle of the harbor, on Ten Pound Island. There are definitely some works he makes that summer that are finished inside, but he’s experimenting more with out-of-doors painting.

The thing that strikes me most about the paintings from 1880 is the immediacy you feel when you look at them.

There are some exceptions, but the later paintings tend to be less narrativistic. A lot of the earlier watercolors—maybe because he was thinking of them as first steps toward the eventual wood engravings for Harper’s—a lot of them are encoded with the elements of the story. That’s part of the image. A lot of the 1880 watercolors are less concerned with storytelling. They’re more about the water, the sky, ships at anchor, and the color contrasts one can encounter out at sea. That’s become his interest as opposed to telling an interesting story.

How does his relationship with Gloucester change this time around? Does his decision to live offshore affect his ties to the community?

His relationship with the larger community of Gloucester is complicated on the second trip. On the one hand, he’s got friends who are of the same class that he hangs out with, like George Marsh—a local eccentric and banker who owned a yacht that Homer painted several times. At the same time, he does have a connection to the working community of Gloucester.

He boards with the lighthouse keeper, Oliver Merrill, that summer. Merrill himself is a bridge figure: he went to Harvard but became a lighthouse keeper, so he has a foot in both the artisanal and middle-class worlds. Homer’s palling around with Merrill and with Marsh, and with local fishermen.

I do think he’s less connected to the community. He’s not isolated by any means; he is interacting with people, but I think he’s less receptive to tourists and critics, people who are looking for him in Gloucester that summer. And we know this because notices about Homer appear in New York and New England newspapers that describe him as a hermit, or as cranky and irritable and rude. This myth of Homer as a recluse comes out of his thorny relationship with the the vacation community of Gloucester and the critics who are part of that.

And that reputation travels with him throughout the rest of his career, especially once he gets to Prouts Neck.

Yeah, and it’s during this summer that mythology of Homer takes shape. At first he’s frustrated by it but, by the time he gets to Prouts Neck, he accentuates it, and he’s doing funny things that augment this existing notion of him as a reclusive, independent, isolated figure.

We’ve talked about how different the paintings are on the second trip, compositionally and in terms of technique, but the tone also seems to have changed. The colors are more muted. He focuses more on the light and atmosphere. I see a lot less of the sentimentality present in the earlier Gloucester watercolors. How much of this do you attribute to the deeper ruptures in American society and consciousness at the time? The first Gloucester trip came during the middle of Reconstruction, whereas this one is on the heels of Reconstruction’s failure. How much of that is Homer absorbing, thinking about, and reflecting?

His works from this summer are tapping into an atmosphere of disquiet that is lingering after the end of Reconstruction and at the beginning of the Gilded Age. It’s a turbulent period, financially, economically, socially—a dark period in a lot of ways, marked by extreme contrasts of wealth and by racial violence. Homer is attuned to all of that. He is skeptical of the simple, patriotic boosterism that you might encounter at a world’s fair of this period, like the Centennial Exposition or any of the fairs that followed. I do think he’s attuned to and tapping into a larger climate of anxious disquiet that’s crystalizing in the beginning of the 1880s and intensifying in the years that follow.

So yes, he is a perceptive social thinker, and we can think about his work as a reflection of that. But he’s also really canny at marketing his paintings, and these moody, melancholic, enigmatic, somber pictures do sell in the period, in the early 1880s, and especially later when he goes to Prouts Neck. He’s celebrated for the very same qualities in the seascapes he makes there. It’s both at the same time. He is tapped into the darkness of the time, and that’s what makes his works appealing and salable.

Nowadays we don’t think so much of Homer’s commercial side. This idealized vision of the solitary artist in search of pure expression is prevalent. It’s interesting to think of him functioning in another way, always keeping his mind on what will sell.

His correspondence from this period and later is filled with negotiations with dealers and collectors. He’s constantly going back and forth about prices and trying to get his various dealers to sell things or promote them in different ways. He’s always thinking about the marketability of his work.

Homer doesn’t work in Gloucester after 1880. What does he take away from this place, and how does he carry that into the works of his mature career—in England, Prouts Neck, the Caribbean, and beyond?

Aesthetically, he takes away a commitment to experimentation. What he’s doing in these watercolors—pushing the limits of the medium, pushing the limits of representation, trying out new forms of composition and brushwork and facture—this all plays out in his work going forward, wherever he is. It really crystallizes in this moment.

His time in Gloucester, and more specifically in Gloucester Harbor, also solidifies his commitment to painting the sea and the working people who made a living on it, and it intensifies his complicated attraction to and empathy for maritime workers. As the later decades of his career unfold, he comes to see himself even as a kind of fisherman or a coastal worker. And the roots of that identification—which, again, is complicated and thorny—are in his time in Gloucester.

His two summers amount to maybe five months of work, but they loom so large over his entire career and legacy. The images he produced in Gloucester really stand out in that way.

You can think of these two visits and this group of work in his career as a turning point. He shifts from a terrestrially minded painter who’s interested in the country and middle-class leisure to somebody who is focused on the sea and its lifeways. That really happens in Gloucester. It’s unusual that such focused experiences had the long-lasting impact that Homer’s Gloucester visits did. I don’t think you could find something like that in other artists’ careers. I think it is unique to him.