Winslow Homer's Rab and the Girls: A Riddle in Paint by user from Antiques & Fine Art magazine

Who had the inspiration to name this dog “Rab”? Was it Homer himself, or Charles Stewart Smith, or some chance admirer who made the connection between the painted
mastiff and one of the most famous canines in nineteenth-century English literature? John Brown (1810–1882), a Scottish doctor and man of letters, published the story of Rab and His Friends in pamphlet form in 1858. Soon after, it was reissued in a collection of Brown’s occasional papers and went on to tremendous popular success, with numerous editions and reprints in Britain, Europe, and America.⁴

Brown’s tale is a memoir of his youth and early days in medicine, when he encountered the dog Rab and his master, James, a hard-bitten yet simple and good-hearted peasant. Scarred from a hundred battles, Rab is a “compressed Hercules of a dog,” having the “dignity and simplicity of great size.” He has a “large, heavy, menacing, combative, somber, honest countenance,” a “deep inevitable eye,” and a look “as of thunder asleep, but ready.” Rab’s behavior is fully consistent with the lore of the English mastiff. An ancient breed, mastiffs are reputed to be so gentle that children might ride on their backs, yet let any stranger threaten master or household, these dogs will attack with great ferocity. The mastiff’s horrible face is only a mask, concealing the most faithful and loving nature.⁵

Rab’s appearance in Homer’s painting is significant. We cannot know whether the artist was thinking about the original when he composed this picture or indeed whether the dog was an afterthought.⁶ Whatever the case, John Brown’s Rab was so well known at the time that the name had acquired an indelible association with the breed. The mastiff, soulful eyes staring into ours, is at once guardian and counterfoil of the girls, who play beauties to his beast. Low, brutish, and dumb, he highlights their refinement and delicacy. At the same time, he is more vividly immediate than the nameless young women so oblivious to everything but that sprig of clover. The dog imports reference to a popular literary narrative into the picture. This once again raises the questions of how the story is told and whether design works with, against, or in spite of the presumed script.

The essence of Homer’s multilevel ambiguity is that there can be no concrete answer to such questions. Still, it is worth considering further the extent to which purely pictorial decisions preoccupied the painter, who may have tacked on a few scraps of story only to draw attention to the complexity and boldness of his formal experimentation. Homer’s composition is at bottom schematic in the extreme, relying on spatial compression, abstract geometrical relations, and carefully calibrated patterns of hue and value. The layout is governed by triangulations: the slant (or hypotenuse) of the ridge behind; the three-point configuration set up by the four-leaf clover and the girls’ gazing eyes; and the right triangle of which the hypotenuse is the line from the lucky clover to the space between Rab’s glowing eyes. The girls are solidly painted, yet convey the effect of two silhouettes, a dark and a light, against a band of green and a wedge of brown.

In addition, the painting furnishes a textbook example of Homer’s systematic use of what art historian Nicolai Cikovsky has dubbed “interchangeable parts,” suggesting an industrial approach to design commensurate with the artist’s early training in the world of commercial illustration. It is almost as if Homer selected elements from various bins and tried them out in various combinations and for various reasons.⁷ The young woman in Autumn (Fig. 2) and the adolescent boy in Gathering Autumn Leaves (ca. 1873) dangle the same branch of orange-red maple leaves in the same manner as does the girl with Rab. The figure in Autumn also wears the same brown velvet jacket with the distinctive gold braid appliqué.

The light-colored bodice worn by the leaf carrier frequently reappears in other works. It is worn by the model in Woman Peeling a Lemon (1876) (Fig. 3), Backgammon (1877; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), and Butterflies (1878; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut). In each of these, the bodice remains white, but the trim color varies: dusty terra cotta in Lemon, delicate blue-gray in Backgammon, and solid black in Butterflies.

Such appearances and reappearances strongly suggest that Homer owned this bodice (as well as the velvet jacket and the ruffled, conical hat) in his collection of “props” used on various models over the span of several years. It is unlikely that he had a set of them with trim in different colors. Rather, the costume itself was like a blank canvas on which the painter could try out selected color combinations in indoor and outdoor light, at various times of day. It seems like a kind of artistic shell game: Which one is the real bodice, in its true colors?⁸

We can get a little closer to the painter’s game by comparing the bodices in Woman Peeling a Lemon and Rab and the Girls. What we see is surely the same garment: white with reddish trim, in both. However, they are strikingly different visually, with the bodice in Lemon a creamy white under an even indoor light, and as noted, a dusty terra cotta of medium value for the trim. When we compare the colors of the same top in Rab and the Girls, Homer’s interest is revealed. Here, the garment is a dull, pallid bluish-gray, and the trim is a muddy brownish-red: transformations affected by dim outdoor light, at twilight, when evening shadows deepen imperceptibly until all color finally disappears. The dress is not gray, but the fact that it looks gray is a key to Homer’s intense fascination with relativism. He recognized that no hue or value is absolute but can change almost infinitely, depending on conditions of viewing, quality and kind of light, and presence of tones and colors around it.

Homer was profoundly affected by his study of the French chemist M. E. Chevreul’s Laws of the Contrast of Colour (first published in 1839), which he owned in a translation given to him in 1860 by his brother Charles. There is ample evidence that Homer methodically worked his way through Chevreul’s equally methodical text, which detailed every possible variation and combination of color and their effects.⁹

Finally, there is the question of pairing. Although many of Homer’s early and late paintings are multifigural, he returned again and again to the simple but often dynamic binarism of the couple. Homer’s earliest work, especially his illustrations, often feature social groupings of young women and men, flirting, picnicking, playing croquet, ice-skating, and dancing. Throughout the 1870s, in both farm and beach scenes, Homer continued to depict boys and girls or men and women together. Yet by the early 1880s, men and women in Homer’s paintings existed in separate worlds. On rare occasions, they dramatically came together again, as in The Life Line (1884; Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Undertow (1886; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts), in which daring men pull helpless women from dangerous seas. In most cases, however, they remained apart, working and communing, and even dancing with others of their sex, as in Homer’s A Summer Night (1890; Musée d’Orsay, Paris) with its two women twirling in a close embrace by the shore of the moonlit sea. Rab and the Girls occupies an important point in this continuum, midway between the sociable and often cheerful scenes of modern life that constituted a significant portion of Homer’s earlier output and the stark scenes of survival and frequent mortality that dominated his later paintings of men braving the sea or the mountains in pairs—to struggle and sometimes die together.

Nothing so fraught with danger appears to be happening in Rab and the Girls, of course. The green sprig of clover is the fulcrum on which the composition hangs in the balance, visually poised to tip first this way, then that, neither side outweighing the other. Yet in its equilibrium there is not resolution but suspense: the suspense of the open-ended story, the artful refusal to deliver a coherent narrative package, and the persistent enigma that hovers around these women and their dog at twilight in the peaceful countryside of upstate New York. A fragment of a story embedded in a sedulously calculated design, Rab and the Girls remains a riddle in paint. If Rab knows the answer, he’s not telling.

Sarah Burns is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (1989) and Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (1996). She is at work on a forthcoming book, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America.