Homer in Boston

This weekend I was in the Boston area and managed to get into the city to see the Homer show at the Museum of Fine Arts. Its a small show of the museum's collection of Homers that includes etchings, drawings and a few paintings. Homer started as an exacting illustrator and moved into that realm of painting that it is hard to talk about. Yes, he painted nature and guys fishing. But that is almost irrelevant. He became an alchemist after years of focused labor. His paint is magic, full of truth and unsentimental obsession. My two favorites were of some cows on a dark silhouetted hillside and his last, Driftwood, of the wild sea and a lone man trying to rescue a tree trunk from the surf.