Homer run American watercolorist, who may have been one of the nation’s first cultural creatives, is popular in museums this summer

Homer is everywhere this summer. No, not the cartoon character. And no, not the ancient Greek poet. Winslow Homer, the American painter, has been the man this summer. Born in 1836 in Boston, Homer had his own artistic odyssey, but he spent the last 27 years of his life in Prouts Neck, south of Portland. Maine easily claims him as one of its own: His pastoral and coastal views helped put the state on the map. America proudly claims him, too: Art historians consider him one of the finest watercolorists.

Town planners also could learn something from Homer. Think of him as a driving force in one of the country’s early creative economies: an artist who came to an area, began working there, and inspired others to bring their families and affluence to the region in the 19th and 20th centuries. And he’s off to a good start in this century.

You can find Homer’s works year-round, of course, at major American art museums. The Portland Museum of Art has a room devoted to him, and earlier this year the museum acquired his studio in Prouts Neck. Already a national historic landmark, the “living history” structure is slated to open next year as an educational and tourist center. But the museum, by no means, has the market on Homer. Not until next year, anyway.

Nearly 100 years after his death in 1910, Homer has made special appearances this summer at museums around the country, including Texas and Tennessee. A set designer in Allentown, Pa., cited the painter as the inspiration for his approach to a production of the musical “Carousel.” On July 4, the Dayton Daily News listed Homer as one of the 230 things “we love about America.” He ranked between the Titanic and country music. Not bad.

“He is considered by many to be the American master, even more so than Sargent, who was brilliant,” said Helen Ashton Fisher, curator for “Winslow Homer: A Collector’s Passion,” running through Sept. 17 at the Farnsworth Museum of Art in Rockland.

The show is small – fewer than two dozen works on loan from the Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, N.Y., which in 2008 will reciprocally borrow from the Farnsworth’s collection of Wyeths – but it traces Homer’s development from early oil techniques to sketches for some of his more famous watercolors. Mostly it underscores his infatuation with idyllic representations of America’s promise. He had, after all, been a chronicler of the Civil War, which, said Fisher, shaped his sensibility.

“I have a theory that Homer came out of the Civil War quite traumatized,” Fisher said. The horrors of the past, she added, shifted his imagination toward hope for the future. “That may be why paintings such as ‘Crack the Whip’ and ‘Breezing Up’ are just so fresh and vital and full of hope and belief in the American future. The possibility of America is embodied in the young people in his paintings.”

While Homer was meditating on the future, he also was drawn to the beauty and cragginess of, among other locales, Maine. As such, many of his works were, perhaps unintentionally, a force for cultural tourism. His masterpieces on the Northeast coast traveled to Boston, New York City and Philadelphia. As with other American artists in the second half of the 19th century, Homer was compelled to depict a country whose treasures were worth fighting for, preserving and unifying under one great national canopy. In short, he was among the earliest and most prolific to show the beauty of American land- and seascapes.

His artistry and international reputation are why he shows up in “Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late 19th Century France” at the Portland Museum of Art and “Americans in Paris 1860-1900” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. But it’s his role as a generator of American personality and adventure that landed him in “Frederic Church, Winslow Homer and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape” running through Oct. 22 at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City.

“The three artists were united in that they built their careers in many respects on the growing tourist industry by pitching their work to people who would travel to these locations,” said Gail S. Davidson, curator of drawings, prints and graphic design at Cooper-Hewitt. “Church’s Niagara paintings toured the Eastern Seaboard and Europe. His work was reported on in the newspapers, as was Homer’s. The brand – if you want to speak about it in the larger sense – was the United States. The net effect of all this was to encourage Americans to identify with the land as a source of pride. So places like Mount Katahdin and Mount Desert became symbols of the U.S. It’s no accident that this occurred after the Civil War, when the country had been divided.”

Painters, like the rest of us, are drawn to cool summer climates, extraordinary scenery, dramatic vistas. Many of them also owned homes in summer communities or spent warmer months on Monhegan and Mount Desert islands. Davidson, who traveled to Maine while organizing the exhibition, was interested in tourist meccas such as Bar Harbor, Yosemite, the Catskills, Adirondacks and Niagara Falls. Did locals always complain about tourists? Had over-development always been an issue? Was the term “summer people” originally pejorative?

“In most of these cases, these places had been depressed economically,” said Davidson, who spends summers in New England. “The timber was cut, and tourism was seen as a feasible way for economies to rise again. That happened in Nantucket, in the Catskills and in Maine, too. What we’re saying with this show is that artists were as much a part of this rise as hotels and railroad development. The sum total of all these efforts was to build a tourist industry.”

In some cases, the rise of tourism both in the upper and middle classes has proved to be a mixed blessing for locals, who sometimes are displaced by high real estate values, and for the environment, which suffers under aggressive construction. The pristine quality that Homer witnessed and memorialized in his paintings is, in some cases, gone – although less so in Maine than in other places he portrayed. His paintings may no longer be about hope for the future but about nostalgia for the past.

It is ironic then that the Farnsworth’s most popular show this summer features Homer. Once, Homer’s paintings drew affluent visitors to Maine. Now art-loving tourists of all classes have been stopping by Rockland to see Homer.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.