and of course very strong with what we're going to hear tonight our friend winslow homer as well as the wife's family all three generations and see him andrew and james they will be coming here for shelter i think this year vermont landscapes and then just a couple of days ago i was having lunch with the new president of the university tom sullivan and he said well why why didn't vermont develop sort of modern modernist tendencies in the course of the twentieth century and slow homer and then when we develop this talk a little bit further i decidedly it's actually a perfectly reasonable explanation and sometimes it is just these funny little twists and turns of history that have fairly profound resonance so what i want to do is talk a little bit about vermont landscapes means he escaped and the thorny question of winslow homer for the evening and then we can take some questions and i'll happy to talk myself out of any trouble i get into but that we hold of one thousand century vermont this in the collection at shelburne museum from eight hundred fifty six steam train in willesden and this is very typical of this time period in american visual culture when one of our great cultural critics in this country was a fat fellow named leo marx who wrote a monumental book back in the fifty's called the machine in the garden where he looks at american literature an american painting american visual culture an points out the arrival of that steam train in our in our consciousness and how we're always sort of for decades sort of oscillating back and forth between the past oral and and the modern a certain sense of modernity peeking in but my my sort of my set up for you and really the maybe this is a straw man for this whole argument is not so terribly different from what happens in portland is charles cobb and i always love the title the entertainment of the boston rifle rangers at portland from the eighteenth thirty's this is in the collection of the brooklyn museum and it's a portland shooting club which is intertwining a militia organization from boston the rifle rangers but in terms of that sort of yeoman painting of the eight hundred thirty s and forty's and fifty's we have kind of two categories that we find both in vermont and in maine mostly we have the sort of artist as tourists coming from other parts of the world got off the train from brooklyn if i remember correctly before he came to vermont in eight hundred fifty two card and was a local son in maine but but that sort of notion of these painters coming from larger metropolitan areas to paint the view to paint the landscape in northern new england is something that we see repeatedly or we begin to get the native born at a certain certain moment james hope marble quarry from the m f a in boston given one of these sort of celebrations of the extract of the sort of the raw material on those schooners was coming from from down east maine so these sort of paintings that celebrate the natural resources celebrate the settling of these two states  and as we sort of roll along with this this image of vermont i would argue that the the imagery that we see in from on is remarkably  nine hundred course patronized by our great patron founder like to have him our web village of snow and this is in the collection of the minneapolis institute of art and if i was to ask you to close your eyes conjure up an image of vermont you would probably come up with his village of stone with the congregational church in the nucleated new england village this really becomes the nation sort of idea and understanding of what vermont and northern new england northern new england is and even in vermont when we get a little strange in the case of the paul sample from the fine arts museums in springfield from in in new england where we begin to sort of look at the the social relationships and some of the sort of tensions that we see we still are sort of living in the senior sketching the scene in fairly traditional terms so you know modernism you know really is sort of the synonym for magical realism which was a term that we've we've lost track of in recent years but in the one nine hundred thirty s and forty's this probably would have been called magical real is magic realism which is codified in an exhibition at the museum of modern art and this is also really the sort of as brooks mentioned why it's before this is the background for the wilds andrew in particular when you see something like that  but there's a begin a sort of a persistence and strength to this notion of the tightly painted image in vermont which takes a different tack in may and that's what i want to talk about a little bit and  i've ever read in the york times for frederick church and it starts off as a frederick church was passed away we didn't realize he was still alive and then and then the second and third line goes on to question the size of the probate judges you know sort of estimate of the of the estate you know how on earth could he possibly made that much money but but church in the eighteenth sixty's in particular is really best understood in terms  that we would reserve for celebrities like rock stars or actors you know when it went to church painting was unveiled in the eight hundred sixty s they would hang bunting across broadway in manhattan so again that whole notion of artists as tourists tourists with a  brush heidi who shows up from brooklyn church more and more famously obviously who shows up to paint following in the footsteps of thomas called little bit in this case but again we have this sort of notion that the landscape itself sort of like that quarry we saw earlier is something to be extracted by someone from away commodified and sold in the case of these these canvases that we see here and to my mind the story really changes when you get to win brothers bill that survives in the homer papers i think it's for forty shirts so anyone purchased forty shirts and one else and so homer was a bit of a clothes horse a bit of a dandy and i think it comes through here role sort of shape changing role playing that homer was able to effect comes about just at the moment that artists begin to really perform their identity as sort of a separate class professional class and the role of the modern artist as something of a bohemian is really under development in this time period so homer's ability to switch in and out of his is sort of main identity and his is more urban identity is something that we wan to develop and talk about a little further a little background on homer of course homer was born in eight hundred thirty six and with really now belmont massachusetts that sort of consider it far west cambridge  massachusetts born into family upper middle class lower upper class his father was a commercial hardware dealer his brothers went to harvard there really in a sort of neighborhood of intelligentsia this is where you get a lot out that chroma lithographs on the eve of the civil war are the most up to date way of conveying visual information to large numbers of people so it's a little bit like leaving college fifteen years ago moving to seattle to become a website designer it's really sort of a very avant garde thing to do in homer's homer's lifetime so he's a commercial artist from that he becomes a sketch artist a war correspondent during the civil war for illustrated magazines and here again if we all remember the deep feelings that came up as the vietnam war was really played out in our living rooms in the one nine hundred sixty s and seventy's there was something very new about this this war that was being televised for the first time this same sort of anxiety and feelings and consternation was rampant during the american civil war because of these illustrated newspapers over wendell holmes sr wrote in his diary they've left a body on my doorstep in the morning because for the first time there were images of the dead being left on the doorstep with the newspaper and it was the sort of telescoping or the collapse if you will of these two spheres domestic life and combat at the front which was very very fraught in this time period and homer's role as a sketch artist really is not to be underestimated in society in that time period he was literally imbedded with his cousin's regiment went to the front me repeated and was climbing into your base there so went to the front repeatedly so much so that his mother wrote to a friend that winslow is back from virginia he is so changed his friends do not recognize him so this whole notion of this modern conflict and the fact that homer witnessed it in a fairly unadulterated way for quite some time in one thousand nine hundred sixty two into eight hundred sixty three now there's a story that i always say i hope is not apocryphal which is in late one nine hundred sixty two homer tells his brother i'm going to try my hand at all painting if i sell you know keep going with this if i don't sell these them to a new york gallery and some years later he finds them in his brother's house so his brother purchased them there are three that are known to survive today  sharpshooter skirmish in the wilderness i forgotten the third and the fourth one is called at the bridge that one hasn't been seen since eight hundred ninety two and that is reason for everyone in the room to keep going to yard sales  because there's all of those four early homers there's no mention that repeatedly but it's you know it's gone gone missing over the years this is a fairly small painting but to my mind it cuts a fairly wide swa the civil war as many of you know we could laundry list all of the technological advances which made it a horrific conflict the tactics were still basically those of napoleonic warfare but the technology had marched forward to such an extent  that it produced an incredibly sanguinary outcome two or three decades earlier you would have had large masses of men with smoothbore muskets and you would maneuver around the battlefield basically sort of positioning and threatening and just firing on mass to effect surrender by the time the civil war you had rifle muskets so it's perfectly reasonable to take out an individual and kill them from quite some distance away and that caused great consternation even more so when all of a sudden the armies began using these scoped rifles you have sharpshooters so you are beginning to target individuals there are numerous diary entries where officers in particular took great umbrage at being shot this was not part of the code of conduct from an earlier generation and in fact if you sort of roll the clock back to european wars of the early nineteenth century europe before you have nation states you have a series of these armies that  belong to sort of individual smaller political entities in the last thing you want to do is shoot the officers because then you have armed masses roaming around europe so this was really quite quite a quite a moment that homer captured here really a sea change a culture change if you will in behavior globally and what's so extraordinary about this painting it's really diminutive thing it's not very big when you stand in front of it you  begin to get chills after a little while and it took me a little bit to kind of reconcile the reason you get chills is that sharpshooter has no face you know he's rendered sort of universal he's rendered essential he could be any soldier and yet this is this is a very modern modern image and very terrifying in its era and so for homer's first oil painting he kind of nails it right out right out of the gate after painting a series of which are these very elaborately costumes soldiers late late in the war an eight hundred sixty six veteran in a new field this is from the metropolitan museum of art biblical elliptical to not give you the final moral to the story is is really is stock in trade he turns his back on you the protagonist has his back to you it's a very powerful sort of gesture that homer uses time and time again and in doing so he creates kind of any man any soldier any farmer here and lets you place yourself in the picture plane very very readily this is one of the first paintings in a strategy i would argue reconciliation that homer commits to canvas in this time period which takes on numerous sort of facets or numerous different components homer goes back to his illustration  career this is a commissioned painting that he worked up from a commission sketch by a magazine he was sent to mount washington to capture this new culture of tourism in new england of the summer this is the art institute great painting from one thousand nine hundred sixty eight which shows the bridle path of mount washington and so just as we see the cars with the bumper sticker you know michel this car climbed mt washington this was the the version of that just after the civil war as the civil war sort of turns new england into something very different and this is a theme that i want to develop too as we talk about the differences between vermont and maine a little bit because i think vermont ended up with a sort of purer dose of what i would call the sort of the therapeutic landscape where it becomes a therapeutic landscape after the civil war if you think about it new england won the civil  war the theory abolitionism comes from boston the men who fought the war came from vermont and new hampshire and maine in large out of proportion the mills the industries springfield armory the clothing mills railroad industry new england sort of comes out of the civil war as the most heterogeneous population economically the strongest and yet something very interesting happens to northern new england we kind which intil a couple of years before was taking sort of more material to the front reverses and all the sudden it's taking the new middle class tourists to watering holes and to hotels and to mountains and to the coast and this is what homer captures homer has we're going we're talking about homer's personality has a little bit of a dandy he also has a very ironic sense of humor and if you know ask ask these questions of these paintings they or project for any american landscape painter to be taken seriously as a landscape painter you would paint niagara falls mt washington in maybe the natural bridge of virginia or something like that but there are certain certain  landmarks in this country which become the national landscape by eight hundred sixty nine when homer paints this he doesn't even bother depicting mount washington it's probably over where i am here he depicts two of his friends on the way that's stump and again this sort of notion that it's ironic or humorous comes from the fact that homer paints himself as the caboose you know the last painter to get to the white mountains the last painter to paint mt washington in this time period and that kind of thing is  sort of rife throughout homer's yonder paintings of the hundred seventy s especially some of the more obviously derivative paintings of his it was a commercial illustration there one or two one of which i his straw boater over his face so he's got this this kind of tongue in cheek about this so so eight hundred seventy s homer is really capturing this therapeutic landscape on this is example of how these works would then get engraved in disseminated appleton journal i'm always fond of the texts that explicates this cover illustration this is the artist in the country and it's a whole explanation of how americans are now going to the country you're going to the white mountains  and the author of the text is trying to understand the relationship between the man in the woman here are they married is this you know boyfriend girlfriend and finally lands on the notion that they must be married because the artist is ignoring the woman a kind of visual and aesthetic to what is going on in all g s and to what is going on which is we have very rapidly americans moving off the farm and into cities we have urbanization industrialization picking up and we where the country has been as it's moving forward and again the sort of the notion that these you know these youngsters these children their sort of scenes of regeneration are extremely important in this time period and again we have to recall that this is the generation that's reckoning with  conflict the likes of which the world has never seen before so this whole notion of rebirth is extremely important a decade after the war in agricultural activities i hearken back to that that letter that you know winslow is back from virginia he is so changed his friends won't recognize recognize and something happens in winslow homer is life in one thousand nine hundred two and we still don't really know what it is scholars like to debate this but basically he gets out of dodge and he goes to color codes on the north sea in england one one theory is that he had a romantic disappointment and got out of town and in color co finds a very sort of primal culture of fisherfolk fisherman fisher women their wives their daughters and again this whole sort of very basic notion of taking sustenance from the sea is something that fascinates homer and so he sketches and he paints these english scenes for two years before coming home we were also discussing at dinner the fact that homer and sergeant john thing are sergeant are really the first to mark he or major painters to work in watercolor in the one nine hundred centuries and this is a sea change prior to homer and sergeant if you were working in watercolor you were either working up a preparatory sketch for an oil painting that was sort of a medium for for sketching if you will or far more likely you were a school girl it would have been something that would have been taught at a female academy and it wasn't taken seriously as a sort of a medium art for art's sake if you will until these two and the techniques that the two pioneer particularly homer i find fascinating and here's an example of a toned paper where homer's working in charcoal and graphite and then he takes the glow washed out  or the opaque watercolor any he adds in all of the highlights of the frost on the waves my contention is that he was very used to communicating with the fellows who were going to engrave his  work as an artist back in new york for those illustrated newspapers and magazines and this use of this very high contrast technique here is a way of being very clear with someone he then sort of carries that forward in a very very modern way and uses it as a compositional tool in his watercolors and we'll see this again and again now from the teenagers into the two hundred ninety s and let me kind of double down on this which is if you are using wash in your sort of watercolor practice before winslow homer you've made a mistake you would break out the opaque pigment because you're going to go back over it and try to correct something you've just done it's a little bit like using correct type  in the time period and so this is really quite a radical thing to be doing to use it in such a foreground way really as the medium which is creating the the excitement in the painting we'll see how that develops a little bit boston evening transcript in an article entitled something like the curious hermit of winslow homer on the maine coast i think we should always be suspicious when a hermit appears in the newspaper and that again is part of this whole roll of how homer is able to really perform his identity as an artist he's very very good at spinning spinning his story homer's family his brother his father purchase a building that was partially under construction which is designed by an architect and john calvin stevens and the family turns it into something of a family compound which they call the ark behind the ark was a little man started roof carriage house maybe fifty sixty feet behind the house and in one thousand nine hundred three homer and john calvin stephens basically steal the family garage the carriage house move it one hundred eighty feet away and park it a little bit closer to the ocean i'm also muse that as they move it they rotate it so it flips it's back on the family house and this becomes home or studio this is the little building that brooks mentioned earlier that was restored and is just now open for tours at the portland portland you some of ours and this is really the heart of my contention here this evening which is this is why maine and vermont look a little different and it has everything to do with this simple little homer becomes the artist who is so committed to the coast of maine that the next generation of modernist painters adopt him as a father figure and a grandfather figure and begin to chatter not only their artistic lives after them but something of their kind of personal sense of self as well almost immediately in that little that little studio homer paints ten or twelve paintings which today are taken to be monuments of american culture the life line from the philadelphia museum of art one thousand nine hundred two a very sensational painting when it was exhibited for the first time she's showing a little skin you know we can see the sort of the form of the of the female body that was taken to be somewhat somewhat risque in avant garde in this time period homer himself had witnessed aground if you could just get it down to the rocks in a storm you could fire a bridge just buoy from the coast guard station on to the ship and you could bring passengers off individually on this basically is a line in the hands of the coast guards and they're the lessons that homer learned in the war in his illustration practice in the eight hundred sixty s and seventy's he's still employing we don't see the the rescuer there we really don't see the woman's face  that if you if you pair you know red necks to your blue little it will pop off so early understanding of complementary and contrasting colors what's so fascinating is homer's copy of should rule is still in existence it's at the strong museum in rochester and homer annotated the book on two or three occasions so it's one of those very very rare occasions where you have a sense of how the artist understood what he was reading in his in his notations so whenever you see the red in a homer painting it's sort of courtesy of his reading of shiv rule of lost in the grand banks one of the great paintings therefore of these great dorie paintings which are monumental narratives of sort of existential drama of taking taking sustenance from the sea dory fishing in the eight hundred eighty s was a very modern activity in fact where the steamer would go out on to the grand banks the dory would go out with individual or pairs of fishermen  and use a very modern form of net to catch catch fish if the fog rolled in the dory fisherman didn't get back to the mother ship he was in very big trouble and so this is one of these sort of very rugged occupations then is now fishing that homer documents in this time period i started my career at the smithsonian years ago working on an exhibition and we had a lo letter in for this painting for a show a very nice fellow from cleveland who owned it and he called me one day and he said i have to apologize i've sold the painting and it won't be available and i can't tell you who bought it  about six months later came up this is the pain that bill gates bought and i remember actually trying to type the letter dear mr gates we'd like to borrow your painting but we never in my director wouldn't let me send it at the  time and that's probably for the best because if i remember the justice department was suing bill gates at that point i'm not so sure he wanted to hear from washington at that time period but again one of these great dramatic scenes from the eighty's home executes and gives to his brother again sort of showing the very close relationship within the within the homer family the oil painting is that the clark and one of those really wonderful wonderful paintings we have hunters in the audience feel kind of question that that scene particularly the oil painting i think would be awfully hard to carry that dear that that that way but he actually looks a little more plausible here than he does in the final the final oil and the oil painting has homer calls it a young buck which i always think is interesting in that sort of double entendres he is your friend to the guide or is he referring to the  deer in the in the painting the whole bag of tricks that homer exhibits in his watercolor technique is on display this is from eight hundred eighty nine called the guide and he's using resist the sort of technique he's going back over he's sort of roughing up the paper to think it up and then sort of revising as he as he goes different washes different sort of techniques from modeling the watercolor watercolor to my mind is an extremely heroic medium it's very funny within museums there's always this kind of hierarchy that you know oil painters somehow rank higher than water colors i never really understood that homer like to claim that he painted very quickly you know in a fit of creative passion he would create a create an oil painting in an evening and that's hogwash we know that he painted them for weeks and worked on them over and over again and then went back years later revised them the gulfstream the great painting at the metropolitan their number of photographs of it in different states over about ten years before he finally sold it these very famous ind the only paintings of homer at work as the gulfstream on the easel and it's very different from the final final version where the water colors you know sort of there it's not with minimal intervention that the artist can then effect after the fact but  this this work in it doesn't reproduce terribly well here but if you stand in front of it or see a really good reproduction you can see that all of his mastery is at work in this sort of vision of the adirondack guide you know emerging from the underbrush here and here's one of my very favorites from the fairly late in his life eighty ninety two and this is the two men in a canoe and it shows again how he's using  opaque water colored wash as a very strong element in the painting to depict the that sort of gleaming phosphorescence of the wake of the canoe this is when homer and his brothers begin to decide that the adirondack become too tame that there are too many people hanging around the north woods club and elsewhere and so they begin to head farther up into canada by the by the eighteen nineties and homer is getting to be on in years at that point  homer's relationship to his architect is fairly important to understand again homer like to put out this image being a sweet generous individual kind of you know his own man at all times he like to claim that he was a hermit he liked to make much of the fact that he stayed late into the winter time at his little shack proud snack but it's also important to realize that homer was a real estate developer i'm homer and his brothers developed neck and homer was also the gate keeper to the architect john calvin stevens who designed something like forty eight houses approx neck and the relationship very tightly i think described in this painting on this is studio in an afternoon fog from the memorial art gallery at the university of rochester this was homer's gift to john calvin stevens the architect it was actually payment for designing a house homer and his brothers on several different occasions swapped land at perhaps neck and it's very telling to me that homer would then start painting from the lots that he owned at proud sneck so this whole notion in let's say by eighteen ninety ninety two that you could buy a house that proud snick and you could also buy the view from your house from windsor homer i think is something that we've really just recaptured in our understanding of homer homer's brother in law as well is an important part of the story arthur benson homer from the benson family of benson hirst brooklyn who also developed not only that part of brooklyn but montauk so products neck as a summer community is very close cousin to montauk point long island and so day there were hotels on that proud snack there's a story within the home or family that younger generations have told me about the lunch flag when homer was hungry he would raise a flag at his studio and the staff from the hotel would bring him lunch  so that's that's a that's my kind of hermit still trying to raise a lunch by myself again one of these marquee paintings in the history of american visual culture the hunt i'm going to digress again for one second when i was restoring or working on the restoration of the home or studio one spring i was driving back out from the studio and this site right here is about two hundred feet from the studio just a little bit sort of heading down east from the building itself so it's literally the view from that piazza that porch of his house would look down right on this drama and homer probably saw this but one spring  there was still snow on the ground right at this location i look over and there is a mother fox with five kids and they were so tame at that point the mother was that i just sat in the car for minutes and watched them plain but it was a very very magical moment because i'm convinced they are the descendants of this this fox again we talked about homer's sense of humor this is obviously getting you know late in life for homer eight hundred ninety four in this time period you  just barely make out the crows are harrying the fox the fox is leaned out it's wintertime there hasn't been much to eat he's trying to get across open open territory we're not quite sure if this murder of crows is about to take down the fox or if he'll make it across  but if there's any sense or any doubt that you know homer basically painted a self portrait here i mean that fox is an avatar for homer's sense of impending age himself check out the signature down here homer literally paints himself as as the fox and this is seen eight hundred ninety two winter coast philadelphia museum of art it's a great painting this is the view give me from the masters was something that the boston schools very very fond of i like to point out that the view to the west was blocked by the checkley hotel so there wasn't much to the west of homer's homer's little studio his brother's house checkley hotel which is a very massive shingle style building so high cliff here which is the the prom and tory to the east of homer's studio appears time and time again this is a particularly lovely painting it's got a little little hunter there in an old army coat to provide a little sense of scale in france that would be called stuff just the sort of notion of the little the little figure to give you but something interesting happens here in the eight animal animals telling a story anymore in the fox hunt he doesn't give you the little gunner anymore he doesn't give you left and right the sort of geese that are getting shot and what he does is he begins to focus very directly very closely in a very nuanced way upon this very spot where the atlantic ocean laps against the rocks on the eastern seaboard and he's doing this for a number of reasons one of which is he's a pragmatis t he's from the sort of the neighborhood in cambridge where pragmatism comes from and they believe the course in lived experience and experience understanding of the world he's also in an  era which believed in the writings of a felony i'm ralph henry gabriel who is an important author that we've sort of forgotten more recently but he authored numerous textbooks in this country and gabriel wrote just you know  the frontier closed teddy roosevelt his friends to the west you know by this time period gabriel gabriel writes that you know the real front here is in fact the the atlantic seaboard and this is where you find something that's very primal on timeless process of wave on rock and most of them are little more painterly like that one we just saw and then weatherbeaten to my mind is really the linchpin and i might kind of put a stake in the ground here that this may be in fact the very painting why made looks different from vermont because homer does something a little unusual in this painting having you know describe the waves on the rocks probably not so differently from charles c the thirty's or anyone else between that era he does something a little unusual right here with this gray stripe where he takes the brush and he just paints a series of these grey pigment lines across the canvas this is to his eye what the water looks like as it pulls back off the rock as it sort of back off the rock but it's a pretty clarion statement and again by this point homer has been selling paintings for generations he's quite generations for years he's quite he's quite wealthy he's sort of painting as he chooses critics a couple of decades earlier chastised him for this kind of thing they said if mr homer clarence cooke the great critic in eight hundred sevent homer lived on the coast in that little shack for all those years is what makes him the father figure to the generation of painters who come next to george bellows this is one nine hundred thirteen the big dorian  activist up from a from brooklyn who brings painters like bernard car for oil in the as you and others to the state and all of these painters begin to measure themselves against winslow homer extremely self consciously after homer dies in one thousand and ten his studio becomes a pilgrimage site for painters and constantly they remark upon visiting the studio constantly they remark upon  the influence of homer and it's that sense of commitment to the coast homer is basically the fellow who re orients american visual culture to the coast the coast previously had always been something point pine tree again watercolor at this point watercolor has become quite normative for painters by the one nine hundred twenty s so homer leads the way in this media as well and you see obviously the in fluence of sort of cubism this is after winslow homer in his diaries writes a manifesto about what it is to be a main artist and really stands as the main painter who views homer as a grand father figure a kindred soul more than just a stylistic and serve influence but someone who patterns provides a pattern for what it is to be a modern painter in the modern modern era so i say the reason maine and vermont look a little differently a the water's on the wrong side over there but b we didn't have a figure like winslow homer who acts as something of a fulcrum between the sentimental culture of the nineteenth century being the culture of community of house and home and the modernist culture of the twentieth century which is a culture where we are increasingly aware of the self of the individual and of the very kind of random and abstract nature of the world around us and so without homer vermont stays in a fairly persistent mode of this sort of realist tradition in maine becomes the paintings and homer's brother actually kept of a boat in gloucester and then he moves it to produce next some years some years later and so homer is actually quite a proficiency sailor and there's a series of them but the great one is freezing up yeah it's very tepid he's very aware of asian influences his studio is actually full of very suggestive asian objects and that's very typical he  was originally he rented a space in the tenth street studio building in new york which was the first purpose built artist studio building william eric chase had a studio there as well and they're full of these exotic mor impressionism a trickier question with homer there are folks who have made the case that we know he went to paris twice and he had to have seen the avant garde painting in that time period i'm not so sure he did and impressionism it's obviously you know would have been the very radical style in the sixty's and seventy's when he was in paris and he wouldn't have been i'm not sure unless he knew to go looking for it he would have been aware of it keyed as we have things like cadmium yellow for the first time so that kind of goes back to that question of several we have a very very active pursuit of permanent pigments from let's say the king thirty's on which by the eighteenth seventies and yeah yeah you know you read you read into it a little bit world war one we talked about shell shock you know a little bit later on we talk about post traumatic stress disorder the civil war is kind of a curious moment in history because we're kind of at a run a cusp if you will people are moving from the country to the city it's kind of a almost a mechanized war if you will just phenomenal bloodshed you begin to sort of wonder what the mechanisms were for dealing with what they saw on home or came back from the war as his mother said you know change men friends don't recognize  and doesn't marry very close to his siblings their wives and their children but there's this kind of sense of melancholy that runs throughout homer painting of homer's life and he's certainly cultivates this somewhat dyspeptic personality that he deploys very strategically again you know per but there's a you know sense of you know the things he witnessed there are really pretty extraordinary without you know the kind of recognition of what you know the sort of the modern psyche with us as a journalist but i need to tell you that you know my family owns john marin's first studio so we went for a kind of a bushwhacking hike one day with our head of p r we brought sandwiches and i actually sat right on that rock because his grandfather who'd been a pharmacist in boston had bought this little island teeny little island to sort of between brunswick and bath and built a family house and right over on the point where the remains america's first little studio was really quite quite extraordinary and he as a journalist was trying to figure out you know how do i write about you know this story which you know it was a space that he's known since he was a child grew up there s eighty eight isn't and he's quite comfortable that's you know that's one of the extraordinary things adam gopnik wrote in the new yorker some years back that you know it's pretty rare for an artist to achieve financial success at every stage of their career he dies and he's immediately in the canon of american painting there's a biography about him year later on the sort of feather this great painter so even though he is calibrating his relationship to the new york and boston art world as it develops in the way that we understand it today he's very successful particularly you know by the eighty's and ninety's he's selling almost everything that that he produces and the other question