William Cross on Winslow Homer / Looking Long, Finding Grace in Crisis, and Painting Truth to Power

[Help us reach our $25,000 end of year goal! Give online to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture today.]We often think that telling the truth only applies to words. But American painter Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) told the truth in pencil, water color, and famously, oil paintings. Coming of age in antebellum America, starting his artistic career as the Civil War began, and dramatically painting truth to power during the complicated and failed Reconstruction era—Winslow Homer looked long and hard at America in its moral complications and struggle toward justice. But he also looked long and hard at the natural world—a harsh, sometimes brutal, but nonetheless ordered world. Sometimes red in tooth and claw, sometimes shining rays of grace and glory upon human bodies, Homer's depiction of the human encounter with the world as full of energy and full of spirited struggle, and therefore dignity.William Cross is author and biographer of Winslow Homer: American Passage—a biography of an artist who painted America in conflict and crisis, with a moral urgency and an unflinching depiction of the human spirit's struggle for survival and search for grace.  As a consultant to art and history museums, a curator, and an art critic and scholar, when Bill sees the world, he's looking long for beauty and grace, and often finding it in art. In this conversation, Bill Cross and I discuss the morally urgent art and perspective of Winslow Homer. We talk about the historical context of American life before, during, and after the Civil War. Including the role of Christianity and religious justification of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. Bill comments on the beautiful and bracing expression of Black life in Winslow Homer's work—truly radical for the time. But Homer's work goes beyond human social and political struggles. We also discuss the role of nature in his work—particularly the human struggle against the power and indifference of the ocean and the wild, untamed animal kingdom.Throughout, you might consider referencing each of the paintings we discuss, all of which are available in the show notes and can be found online for further viewing and reflection.Show NotesGive toward the Yale Center for Faith & Culture $25,000 matching campaign. Donate online here, or send a William R. Cross, Winslow Homer: American Passage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)Winslow Homer: CrosscurrentsPaintingsClick below for painting referencesPrisoners from the Front (1866)The Brush Harrow (1866)Dressing for the Carnival (1877)Visit from the Old Mistress (1876)The Gulf Stream (1885)Fox Hunt (1893)About William CrossWilliam R. Cross is an independent scholar and a consultant to art and history museums. He served as the curator of Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869–1880, a nationally renowned 2019 exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum on the formation of Winslow Homer as a marine painter. He is the chairman of the advisory board of the Ya