Byline: TIMOTHY CAHILL Staff writer
In the 1870s, when he was in his 40s, Winslow Homer dubbed himself ``The Obtuse Bard'' as an initiation into a New York social club. The handle could not have been more apt. Even as it revealed the artist's aggressive sense of humor, it cast light on the cold-eyed perception that made him one of America's greatest painters.
To call himself a bard was of course Homer's allusion to his shared name with the Greek author of ``The Iliad'' and ``The Odyssey.'' As much to the point, though, it was also a declaration of his own nature. By then, the artist, whose work is the focus of a new exhibit in Cooperstown, must have recognized that he was more a poet than a journalist. In 1876, when he was 40, he left a lucrative career as a magazine illustrator to devote himself fully to painting. A couple years before that, he had begun to paint in watercolors, the most lyrical of painting mediums.
As for the obtuse part, it was above all significant of Homer's abiding contrarian nature. The word means dull-witted or slow, which the painter decidedly was not, though at this early stage of his fine art career, when …
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