Winslow Homer

If the Fourth of July has you reflecting on our national character, plan on visiting the National Gallery of Art, where a new Winslow Homer exhibition opens tomorrow. Cherished American values such as independence, self-reliance and optimism are expressed in Homer’s portrayals of lone hunters, resourceful fisher folk and playing children.

These paintings and drawings, assembled from the museum’s own impressive collection, idealize a bygone era spent on unspoiled waters and picturesque farmland. Their visions of halcyon days in a sprawl-free America won’t disappoint even the most nostalgic of viewers.

Among the 50 works on display are old favorites such as “Breezing Up (A Fair Wind),” a buoyant sailing scene, and “Hound and Hunter,” with its rope-throwing boy in a dinghy trying to snare a shot stag in the water. They evidence the 19th-century painter’s main achievement in creating an American archetype, the outdoorsman confronting nature.

Homer played to popular taste, but he also was capable of great subtlety and skill, as is evident in this three-gallery show. Some of his watching and waiting people hint at longing and loneliness that run against sunny American type.

Although tiny compared with the National Gallery’s 1995 Homer retrospective, the exhibit serves up a selection of varied works that well represents the artist’s entire career, from the early 1860s to the early 1900s. These chronologically arranged pictures show how the self-taught artist excelled in illustration, drawing, oil painting and watercolor — often rendering the same composition in different media.

That willingness to experiment — another American trait — infuses Homer’s seascapes and sporting scenes with a modern immediacy. For this artist, nature was not an awesome vision to be viewed from afar, as in the large, panoramic canvases of the Hudson River School, but a force to be felt up close and personal in smaller, more intimate paintings.

Homer’s powers of observation were honed during his early career as a freelance illustrator for weeklies in Boston and New York. The first gallery shows off his visual note-taking as a correspondent during the Civil War. Among his most affecting reportage is a pencil drawing of young runaway slaves who did menial work for the Union Army.

From these illustrations, the Boston-born artist created his first oil paintings. One of the earliest records two Union infantrymen in a moment of homesickness as a military band plays “Home, Sweet Home,” which also is the title of the painting.

Arranged like many of Homer’s subsequent compositions, the paired men presage another American standard, the buddy picture. The painting also implies that the situation may be different than it appears, a message continually sent by his art. The soldiers’ makeshift home of tents and campfire is anything but sweet, and you can sense their battle fatigue.

Even in Homer’s more benign depictions in the show, such as a teacher in front of a red schoolhouse and a family on the beach, the figures gaze into the distance at something unseen, indicating psychological tension. This undercurrent of discomfort and uncertainty — an anomie that would be amplified by artist Edward Hopper in the 1940s — saves Homer’s paintings from being merely sentimental.

After the Civil War, Homer spent 10 months in France, where he was influenced by the Barbizon School. His 1870s paintings of schoolmarms and farm women reinterpret through American eyes the idealized peasants of Jean-Francois Millet and other French artists. Images of solitary figures in bucolic settings express the moral superiority of rural culture over city life and convey a yearning for pre-Civil War days.

Several of these paintings reflect Homer’s growing skill in watercolors. In 1873, at age 37, he took up the medium to make a buck and soon became a master of fluid, rapid brushwork. Some of his early watercolors, such as “The Milk Maid,” have a highly finished, academic look. Others, including “Blackboard,” with its geometric markings and banded background, appear almost modern.

Whether overworked or sketchy, the watercolors are the main attraction here. Homer became a master of the medium, and compared with the somber oils, his color-washed farm and shore scenes appear fresh and light. Another reason for paying attention to these watercolors is that, apart from special exhibits such as this one, the fragile works are rarely brought out of storage for public viewing.

In his later career, Homer kept improving his watercolors through his obsession with the sea. This interest was developed during a 20-month stay in the northern English village of Cullercoats during 1881 and 1882. There, the artist continued experimenting with technique, silhouetting female “buddies” repairing fishing nets against backgrounds scraped of color.

After returning to America, Homer expanded on his water themes with more atmospheric pictures. In 1883, he moved from New York to Prout’s Neck, Maine, to live and work in a carriage house on his family’s property. (Last September, the Portland Museum of Art announced plans to purchase the studio from Homer’s great-grandnephew for an undisclosed price.)

During the winters, Homer often traveled to Florida, Cuba, the Bahamas and Bermuda with plenty of paint, paper and brushes to record what he saw. These working vacations resulted in many of his finest — and freest — watercolors.

In “Key West, Hauling Anchor” and “Salt Kettle, Bermuda,” the artist applies veils of color while leaving patches of white paper so that we practically feel the heat of the brilliant sunshine on water, boats and buildings. In “The Coming Storm,” a blotch of grayish blue — a potential mistake in less skilled hands — forms a threatening cloud above a wash of azure.

Homer also visited the Adirondack Mountains, where he painted fishermen and hunters, including a watercolor sketch for the larger oil painting “Hound and Hunter.” The study, with its animated lines and blobs, is more engaging than the moodier, darker canvas, proving the artist’s adeptness at capturing the moment.

The exhibit concludes with “Right and Left,” a 1909 oil of two ducks caught in midair over a charcoal gray sea that was completed in the year before Homer died. Just visible above the middle wave are a tiny hunter in a boat and the red flash of his gun.

Remarkably, the scene is painted from the ducks’ vantage point above the water, not the hunter’s below. We are unsure whether the flying and diving animals are dead or alive. It is this ambiguity that keeps us looking at Homer’s art.

WHAT: “Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art”

WHERE: National Gallery of Art, East Building, Fourth Street and Constitution Ave. NW

WHEN: Tomorrow through Feb. 20; Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

TICKETS: Free admission

PHONE: 202/737-4215

WEB SITE: www.nga.gov