Eastern Point
1900
Oil on canvas
30 1/4 x 48 1/2 in. (76.8 x 123.2 cm)
1955.6
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Homer painted three great seascapes in the fall of 1900: On a Lee Shore (Rhode Island School of Design), West Point, Prout's Neck (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute), and Eastern Point. He conceived of the latter two as companions, writing that as a pair they would "make an impression." He finished Eastern Point first, signing and dating it on October 14—a specificity as to day rare in landscape paintings of this scale and era. The two pictures together not only make an impression but culminate a decade in which Homer devoted himself to painting the Maine seacoast, and bracket, geographically, the half-mile-long cliff line of Prout's Neck that was his focus. When the two were seen together in New York in 1901, they prompted some critics to praise his truthfulness: "He shows us the elemental beauty of the sea, and shows it with undiluted realistic force." Most writers then and throughout the first half of the century preferred Eastern Point to the more showy West Point, Prout's Neck. Eastern Point has a relatively complex history of ownership. Lyman G. Bloomingdale, founder of the New York department store, bought the work in 1903. Clark acquired it two decades later, in 1923. But he sold it; by 1929 it was in the collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art. Only in 1954, after it was deaccessioned by the Addison, and after he had both acquired West Point, Prout's Neck and determined to share his collection with the public through founding the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, did he buy it back, reuniting the great pair of Homer's late seascapes.
—Marc Simpson, curator of Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History
