Henry McBride on Winslow Homer

Florine Stettheimer has long been considered one of the most wholly original artists working in early twentieth-century America. A modernist painter, designer, and tastemaker who brought an insider-outsider perspective to her scenes of the New York art world, she found her subjects in the avant-garde circles of friends and family that merged in her sisters’ famous salons. In both city and country settings, national and expatriate artists, poets, dancers, and musicians of different genders and sexual orientations came together in creative fellowship with full social acceptance.


During the 1920s, Stettheimer painted seventeen innovative and playfully sardonic portraits of members of her artistic circle—including the noted and openly gay American critic, Henry McBride—with iconography that wittily conveyed their passions and personality. McBride, known as the “dean of art critics,” was a columnist for both the New York Sun and the modernist journal the Dial during the 1920s and 1930s. He was particularly supportive of distinctive artists like Stettheimer, along with members of the Stieglitz Circle, whom he felt represented the most “American” character of contemporary art. He also was devoted to a select number of late nineteenth-century painters, especially Winslow Homer, who McBride once referred to as “my religion.”


In this mixed media on paper, Henry McBride on Winslow Homer, Stettheimer painted a whimsical portrait of her friend on top of a photomechanical reproduction of Homer’s Palm Tree, Nassau watercolor (1899, The Met). The work figuratively and literally embodies its title, underlining the critic’s acclaim for the late nineteenth-century artist. Homer’s watercolor belongs to a group of twelve primarily Caribbean subjects purchased by The Met in 1910. The drawings were on regular view at the Museum for decades, and Stettheimer likely acquired the reproduction on which she wittily depicted McBride at the institution.