National Gallery showing Homer works

Celebrating the Fourth of July, the National Gallery of Art has mounted its first show in a decade on Winslow Homer, often called the greatest American artist of the 1800s.

Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American art, pointed to Homer’s illustrations of the Civil War, many done for Harper’s magazine.

There’s no general in a cocked hat or serried ranks of soldiers. Instead, there’s an unseen killer -- a sharpshooter hidden in a tree -- as well as a couple of mounted Union “scouts” in Confederate uniforms and sloppily dressed soldiers on domestic camp duties, listening to a band playing “Home, Sweet Home.”

Though the traditional American teacher was the stern schoolmaster who Kelly notes “taught by discipline, not by nurture,” Homer chose to portray instead a demure, handsome and very young schoolmistress. She is poised in front of a blackboard to give a lesson in mechanical drawing. Another stands with her books in front of a small red schoolhouse

A shrewd businessman, Homer found oil painting required a lot of work and didn’t sell easily. Watercolors took less time and could be priced to make them more accessible to modest collectors. He asked for the then-considerable sum of $100 for the watercolor called “The Sick Chicken” in 1873.

The gallery has such a large collection of Homer’s work -- 10 oil paintings, 30 watercolors, 30 drawings and 340 prints -- that the selection of 50 pictures in the show gives a broad survey of a career that lasted more than a half-century. The show opens on Sunday and will be on view through Feb. 20. Admission is free.

Though many of Homer’s figures, especially of young people, reflect what many see as characteristically American optimism, there is melancholy too.

He had a long fascination for the sea and human struggles with it. In “Dad’s Coming!,” an early painting of a fisherman’s wife and son waiting at the seaside of Gloucester, Mass., the boy is eagerly scanning the horizon. His knowing mother, meditative, looks away from the sea.