Milking Time
Homer, Winslow, American painter, 1836-1910
1875
oil on canvas
Gift of the Friends of Art and other donors, 1967

Milking Time is a pivotal work in Winslow Homer's career. It was executed in the same year that the artist abandoned his profession as an illustrator and initiated his highly successful career as a fine artist. For twenty years beginning in the mid-1850s, Homer established a reputation as a brilliant commercial artist. He created charming and sometimes humorous images of quotidian life and compelling, keenly observed visual reports of the Civil War for magazines such as Ballou's Pictorial, Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Journal.

A sojourn in France from 1866 to 1867 may have augmented the knowledge of French painting that Homer acquired in America through art galleries and dealers, exhibitions and periodicals. It is likely that Homer saw, both in America and Europe, significant works by French academic painters such as Jean Leon Gerome and Alexander Cabanel, as well as those by Thomas Couture, Gustave Courbet, Eduoard Manet and the Barbizon school of landscape painters including Jean Francois Millet.

While the work Homer created prior to his trip to France was executed using plein air techniques, his production in the decade following that tour reveals a more studied path from initial concept to completed work. For example, the recent retrospective mounted by the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) featured a group of four preparatory watercolors and drawings of the young maid on the left. Unlike his illustrations, which for the most part, recorded events as they happened, his paintings from this period demonstrate a process of gathering information from many sources and synthesizing it in a single, unified composition. The result is, to our eyes, convincingly realistic.
When the painting was exhibited in the year of its creation, it was both celebrated and reviled by critics. On the one hand, the artist was praised for an apparent lack of interest in mimicking European art. One critic wrote, Homer 'cares nothing for schools of painting; he is utterly free from foreign influences' He continued that the artist was one 'of our native genre painters who resolutely confines himself to American subjects' and 'resolutely refuses to imitate the methods of any of the fashionable foreign masters' By contrast, others criticized the artist for being so singular in his expression that he demonstrated a flagrant disregard for the then acceptable styles and conventions of painting. One art historian asserted that 'once in a while Homer painted a picture his critics found so trying - so simply exasperating,' as one of the critics said of Milking Time that he might almost be thought, by ...pushing his individuality too far,' to have done so purposely to challenge them (as Whistler at just this time and in just this way was doing so purposefully in England)' To those who shared this opinion, the work had a tangible lack of finish that resulted from 'incomprehensible' smears and splotches of paint' and demonstrated a 'crude perverse originality, seeking to express itself in flakes and even glacial bursts of pigment'

Conversely, the eminent Henry James characterized Homer's works from this period as unqualified successes in treating the fundamental challenge of creating a pictorial reality; that is, a reality based on convincing image in two dimensions. In an article about the show in which this work was exhibited, he wrote '[the artist] has chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization' he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier; and, to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded'

An art critic for The Nation was most enthusiastic about this painting. He wrote, 'This year [Homer] puts forth several novelties of effect that strike the eye like revelations. Another artist, for instance, would hardly think of making a motive out of the horizontal stripes of a fence, relieved against a ground of very slightly differing value, so as to make the group at the fence appear like a decoration wrought upon a barred ribbon. Yet that is the problem very effectively wrought out in his milking-picture' By contrast to the artist's earlier style in which groups of figures were placed in narrative vignettes, one art historian describes the 'principle effect and primary purpose [of the painting is its] vastly more complex, sophisticated, and overtly decorative pictorial construction' Another described his work from this period as evidence of 'an explicit aestheticism manifested by subtleties of design and refinements of pictorial arrangement'

Homer matched this approach to designing his composition with a spontaneous technique and an 'immediate, untutored command' of his materials. Whether the result of ignorance arising from a lack of disregard for the academic rules of painting, the effect is one of the painting's most surprising features; the fence showing through the milkmaid's skirt. Called 'pentimenti', this shadow indicates that the figure was added after the fence had been painted. Recent conservation to remove several layers of yellowing varnish has made the shadowy form of the fence more pronounced.
In terms of subject, Homer's paintings were described as implying 'no explanatory sonnets; the artist turns his back squarely and frankly upon literature' Instead their narrative elements were deployed to evoke associations and responses from their viewers. When asked to supply a description of one of his paintings, the artist replied, 'I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description' Instead, Milking Time is evidence of art historian Roger Stein's assertion that Homer's 'finest works'; often internalized an ironic dysfunction between the obvious countercurrent of meaning that was, in one way or another, troubled and troubling. 'In this case, the painting is, at once, a celebration of life in rural America and an elegy on its decline in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

'It is a gift to be able to see the beauties of nature.'

- Winslow Homer