This time last spring, I spent a day in Chicago with my wife, Kelley, taking in the Homer & Hopper dual exhibit at the Art Institute. The Homer exhibit encompassed a significant piece of museum real estate, and had a sizable number of his “Adirondacks” and “Tropics” period paintings. And while his angling works were not the center of attention (I missed this exhibit in 2003), there were still enough of them to keep me focused as we wandered from room to room. Among my favorites were Homer’s “Leaping Trout” (1889), “Two Men in a Canoe” (1895), “Life-Size Black Bass” (1904), and some of his preliminary efforts toward the famous oil, “The Gulf Stream.”

The “Leaping Trout” is one of Homer’s signature brook trout scenes, with the fish airborne in pursuit of an insect. Of all the pieces in the exhibit, it was perhaps this one that would be the most recognizable to the “man on the stream.” There is little mistaking the famous flying brook trout!

My favorite Homer painting at the exhibit was “Two Men in a Canoe.” It was a piece that I had not seen before, and its sense of reflected light was so “on” that I felt Homer truly embodied the angling moment as it would shine from memory. The scene is fairly straightforward: Two men in a canoe, seen in profile, on an Adirondacks lake. A feeding trout is hinted at by a single, nearby rise-form. The way Homer treats the afternoon light glinting from the rise, the canoe’s wake, and the general glare of the lake’s surface, speaks of a man who truly knew — and lived — such scenes.

“Life-Size Black Bass” is also an interesting work, with its “forced foreground” bass, leaping wildly with Homer’s favored Scarlet Ibis set firmly in place. The fish seems to come from the frame itself, creating a sense of intimate action for the viewer. The brilliant fly may be a Homer device (he was known to employ a deliberate splash of vermilion in his work), but it is also a fly that a bass might take in a real angling situation (I’ll have to try it at some point).

And of course, one cannot think of Homer without also thinking of his “Gulf Stream” oil, a painting that leaves an open, but likely unfortunate, ending for the central figure. And while that great work itself was not part of the exhibit, a number of preliminary studies were on-hand. To me, the most interesting was a small study that focused on the derelict boat and the water-line encroaching on the central figure. According to research done on the sketch, Homer had originally painted the water as lapping much higher onto the deck of the boat, basically giving away the “ending” of the “story.” He later revised the water-line downward, which allows for a more uncertain fate. Knowing how the final painting affected me in my youth, I think Homer made the right choice…

All of that brings me to Robert Demarest. Demarest is an angler/author/artist who, in 2002, sent me a copy of his book, Traveling with Winslow Homer (see cover above). I had hoped to do a review for a fly mag, but art history books—angling-related or otherwise—are not typical fare, and the review never happened. Well, now that FF & W is up and running, I can at least present the work and point interested readers in the right direction.

The book is an easy read, and follows Homer through his decades of painting, starting with his early work as an illustrator and Civil War artist through to his final efforts in the beginning of the 20th century. Those looking for a purely fishing focus will not find it here, the author choosing instead to paint a larger picture of the artist and how angling was influential (or incidental, as the case may be) throughout his life. That is not to say that the author’s work comes across as disengaging to a fly-fishing audience. Not at all. It’s just that the book is more than a catalog of the artist’s angling-focused works.

Demarest provides some meat in his text, and wants the reader to not only come to know Homer better as an artist, but also to see the man with a personal perspective. The author’s personal perspective includes more than just commentary from afar, as Demarest takes the time and effort to visit a number of the locales (either general or specific), that were important parts of Homer’s painterly and personal lives. This lends a sense of immediacy to the text that is hard to capture when one writes from a position of scholarly, but distant, authority.

For example, the area near the Mink Pond Outlet (site of the widely known “Waterfall in the Adirondacks” (c. 1889) is described (and photographed) by the author via personal experience as he retraces some of Homer’s steps. Using the same “on-the-ground” type of approach, the author relates Homer’s fishing whereabouts to his work, and employs a photographic exploration of actual locations of various paintings. Seeing the way Homer presents his idealized compositions and drama as compared to the literal canvas of a scene, gives some insight into how Homer “saw” a location, and what he wanted from his finished work.

As an award-winning illustrator and artist himself, Demarest treats his subject with the artist’s perspective, lending what some may see as a different take on Homer’s personality and outward expression. The author also slips in some of his own angling experiences, as well as a sprinkling of Homer-related angling bits and pieces (such as a Scarlet Ibis tied by the renowned Ted Patlen, and a watercolor of the same).

In the end, the book feels like one man’s quest to know the artist on a more intimate level, and to share some of that intimacy with the reader. The quest is not one of pedantic intensity—the book can be read in a day—but it still serves to educate and entertain, and to further clarify a life that was tied to angling perhaps as much as painting.

If you are interested in a copy of Demarest’s effort, you can order the book from Amazon.