Interpretive Resource

Like Croquet Scene, Winslow Homer’s Mount Washington explores themes of leisure in post–Civil War America that signal shifts in the roles of women. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, of which Mount Washington is the highest peak, were celebrated by artists, travel writers, and naturalists for their sublime wilderness. Thomas Cole traveled to the White Mountains for the first time in 1827 and was one of the first landscape painters to capture on canvas the quintessentially romantic features of the mountains. Many artists were attracted to the untamed scenery of the region, including John Frederick Kensett and Albert Bierstadt. But by the time Winslow Homer arrived on assignment from Harper’s Weekly in 1868, the landscape was dominated by tourists and the comforts they demanded: grand hotels, railroads, and well-groomed trails for walking and riding.

Homer traveled to the White Mountains in the summers of 1868 and 1869 specifically to document tourist activity; these were the only trips he made to the region. The sketches, illustrations, and paintings that resulted from these journeys depict the interaction between people and the landscape, a relationship dominated not by nature, but by humankind. Mount Washington portrays a type of tourist activity known as scenic touring. The women on horseback are accompanied by fashionably dressed male companions who point to designated spots with grand overlooks. The objective for both men and women was to undergo a memorable experience tinged with danger; the rocks surrounding the tourists and their horses produce a shadowy suggestion of peril. In a related painting, Bridle Path, White Mountains (1868; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts), the artist used the same compositional device of forbidding rocks in the foreground to confine a lone female rider. The sublimity of the Art Institute’s painting is suggested by the cloud-shrouded summit of Mount Washington and the distant, sketchily rendered figures walking toward the Summit House, a hotel at the top of the mountain that opened in 1853. A drawing of the riderless horses and their tack, Study for the Summit of Mount Washington (1869; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York ), reveals Homer’s reliance upon detailed drawings to compose his finished works. By 1869 hiking and riding were not the only two ways a traveler could ascend Mount Washington: the Cog Railway, which transported tourists to the summit, had been completed that same year. Homer’s depiction of riders, then, documents a vanishing mode of travel and alludes to riding as a sport (for both men and women) rather than as a necessity. In Mount Washington, as in Croquet Scene, Homer explored both the social and aesthetic significance of his female subjects. Although they appear to be accompanied by men, women are the focal points of the composition. That they are independent and capable perhaps alludes to the emergence of women in the public sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their clothing, while fashionable, is simpler and more practical than that of their counterparts in Croquet Scene, suggesting the freedom riding gave women, as well as the skill and sheer physical exertion involved.

The depiction of the eastern landscape as a stage for human activity, particularly that of tourism, rather than as a paradise charged with Christian and nationalistic associations, is characteristic of work produced after the Civil War. For Homer, who served during the conflict as an artist-journalist, the firsthand experience of a ravaged land and the dramas enacted upon it stood in contrast to the relatively benign character of his White Mountain scenes. The forceful presence of the rocks in the foreground anticipate Homer’s powerful later seascapes, including The Herring Net.