Pre-Production

Assembling a narrative about Homer was an interesting challenge. Little information exists about his personal life. ‘Mind your own business!’ was his favourite riposte to most inquiries, according to a friend. From the records that have been passed down, Homer emerges as a curious character who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and, in later years, led a reclusive life.

In some ways, this lack of information about the man himself was refreshing, as it pushed us to explore the artist more through his work than his biography. And what a body of work. Painting at a time of incredible upheaval in the United States, his pictures of soldiers from the Civil War, post-emancipation Black subjects and dramatic seascapes are iconic.

We started our script with his early career as a magazine news illustrator. With the Civil War as his backdrop and a journalist’s pass to the front line, his sketches of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ reality of war - the exhausted and mud-splattered soldiers, and precariously tree-perched sharpshooters - were turned into woodcuts and featured in magazines including 'Harper's Weekly'.

His images of formerly enslaved people at a time of great social change across America - the Reconstruction era - were a key part of the exhibition’s narrative and of our script also. Homer’s post-war paintings ‘The Cotton Pickers’ (1876) and ‘Dressing for the Carnival’ (1877) caught sensitive moments in the everyday lives of African Americans. We recognised that we should include a voice to explore the motivation of a middle-class white painter in capturing the images of Black subjects.

Perhaps the most stand-out and least expected chapter of Homer’s story for a British audience was the 18 months (1881–2) he spent by the North Sea in England. At the age of 45, he visited Tyneside and the small coastal town of Cullercoats. Here he witnessed the raw lives of the fishing community and the local Life Brigade, as well as gales, sea rescues and the day-to-day existence of the fishermen and fishergirls.

Homer was attracted to the power of nature, the sea in particular, and the obstacles it created for humans to overcome. This theme was evident from his time in Cullercoats and also when he returned to the United States and his studio at Prout’s Neck in Maine. This period of his work, when he increasingly strips out people from his canvas and focuses on raw nature, became the final act of our script, alongside vibrant watercolours painted in Cuba, Bermuda and the Caribbean, and an exploration of his legacy work of a Black sailor adrift at the sea’s mercy in ‘The Gulf Stream’ (1899).

Filming

We knew that the early part of Homer’s life would need to be covered by his magazine news illustrations and early paintings. So his time in Cullercoats gave us a wonderful opportunity to capture specially-shot material of a seaside town that - with its lifeboat station, stone pier and watch tower all intact - would still be recognisable to Homer today.

Our filming in Cullerocats included an interview with Susan Johnson, granddaughter of Maggie Jefferson, who appeared in many of Homer’s sketches and paintings. Susan, who has written a book about her grandmother and the local fishergirls, caught the mood of Cullercoats in the late 19th century, and the daily uncertainty and dangers the local fishing community faced. Each family wore a fishing sweater, she told us, with a unique pattern, so they could be easily identified if they drowned. And she remembered Maggie from her childhood; a thread connecting her to the past and the paintings by Homer. It was touching to film Susan walking down the same pier on which Homer once sketched her grandmother with a creel - a wicker basket for fish - and the wind catching her dress.

Chiara di Stefano, a Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery, joined us in Cullercoats to discuss the Life Brigades and the theme of ‘Perils at Sea’. In high winds she spoke eloquently about Homer’s monumental women who waited on the shore with their children for the return of their fishermen. And the story of the Iron Crown, which foundered at the mouth of the Tyne in 1881, with the rescue of its crew by the local Life Brigade sketched and painted by Homer. We also filmed with Chiara at the local RNLI station, which is still rescuing sailors from the same waters 140 years later.

A specialist drone operator came down from Edinburgh to capture aerial shots of the coastline and town, and Susan clambering over the rocks and looking out to sea from the Watch Tower.

In our studio we captured an interview with the exhibition curator, Chris Riopelle. We have worked with Chris many times and he never fails to share his knowledge in a way that is as insightful as it is accessible. We chose to film against the bare, white brick studio wall, with a sunlit feel. We also filmed with Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a Research Associate at the Pitt Rivers Museum, who had worked on the interpretation of the text for the exhibition, and who spoke about Homer’s perspective on Black Americans and why the themes he explored, which included migration, are still relevant to the world we live in today.

This offered the perfect segue into a sequence shot in New York with the artist Hugh Hayden. He came to Winslow Homer through Kerry James Marshall’s ‘Gulf Stream’ (2003), a work by another African American artist that was in dialogue with Homer's canvas, reinterpreting the scene into one of leisure. Hayden made a sculpture of a boat that was displayed in Brooklyn Bridge Park. His ‘Gulf Stream’ sculpture - with ribs and a spinal column - is both a boat and a body, whose unknown passengers may have made it to safety or been swallowed by the sea. Hugh’s contribution brought Homer’s legacy into the modern day.

Our final interview and sequences were shot with Ramey Mize, Assistant Curator of American Art, at the Portland Museum of Art. In 2006, the museum bought and restored Homer’s Prouts Neck studio to how Homer would have known it and it was reopened in 2012. We filmed an interview on the balcony with Ramey, and sequences of her in the gardens and by the rugged coastline where Homer lived out his final days painting nature in its most stripped-back form. This was summed up beautifully by Chris Riopelle who said ‘late Homer is focusing on the elemental in Nature. The thing from which nothing more can be subtracted.'

Post-Production

Balance is everything with the best video content. We knew we had to spread the material we had captured in Cullercoats, the filming with artist High Hayden in New York, and the shots at Prouts Neck on the coast of Maine evenly across the video. These modern sequences would balance the screen time we saw our expert interviewees in vision. Likewise, spreading out the telling quotes from Homer across the film was important.

The archive images added another layer of richness. The paintings were all shown as jpeg images rather than shots of the original artworks. These were supported by the ‘Harper’s Weekly’ woodcut illustrations, historical images of Cullercoats provided by a local historian for a donation to the restoration of the famous Watch Tower that featured in Homer’s artwork, and an incredible photo of the crew that rescued the survivors of the Iron Crown in 1881.

We knew music had an important role in this art exhibition film, as it could immediately set the scene, whether in Civil War America, coastal Maine or at Cullercoats on the rough North Sea coast. Sometimes you get lucky, and we could have not been more fortunate when looking for music to support the sequence about ‘Perils at Sea’ to find that the iconic British hymn traditionally associated with seafarers - ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’ - was written in 1860, just 20 years before Homer visited the Tyneside coast.

Composed in 1860 by William Whitin, it was inspired by his survival of a fierce storm at sea and the dangers of the sea described in Psalm 107. Appropriately for our story, it was popularised by the Royal Navy and the United States Navy in the late 19th century. Although we used an instrumental version, the lyrics are well known to anyone who has attended church regularly in the UK, landing on our theme’s punchline.

Eternal Father strong to save
Whose arm has bound the restless wave
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
It's own appointed limits keep
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in Peril on the sea

The end result was an exhibition film of which we could be proud. We had shaped a balanced and visually rich story. It followed Homer's journey at a time of great upheaval in American history, from a magazine illustrator to the coast of Cullercoats and back to the seaboard of the Eastern United States. And along the way we explored a number of the 40 oils and watercolours in the exhibition that have made the artist iconic in America, and perhaps now just a little more familiar to those in the UK.