John Whorf Watercolors

By Lisa N. Peters

What strikes me in looking at the watercolors of John Whorf, featured in our current show of five American watercolorists, is a feeling that I’d like to be in the places that Whorf painted and that this might actually be possible!
 

Although Whorf depicted many of the same types of subjects as those of Winslow Homer and Frank Benson in their own watercolors, what stands out as distinctive in Whorf’s work is the sense that the experiences he shows us are accessible ones. Large expanses often open up before us within his frames, yet there is always a point of reference from which to look out and see through the artist’s eyes.

Rather than statements of artistic dexterity (although he was dexterous) or poetic rumination (and there is certainly poetry in his sensitivity to light in particular), what appears to have interested Whorf time after time were those moments when, in the course of doing something active or sportive in the outdoors, we are struck with a sudden sense of amazement at just how beautiful nature is—it’s as if we hadn’t noticed what is around us because we are too busy, and then there’s a moment where we look up and become aware of our surroundings.

Whorf’s duck hunters (seen above) seem to experience one of these times. Standing at the shore at the crack of dawn, ducks paddling innocently below them, the hunters have lowered their guns to gape at the open sky where the soft-rimmed lavender clouds are set in relief against the crepuscular light. Countering the stillness of the hunters, whose forms seem locked with the land, the clouds sweep upward and away from us, cropped by the edges of the work as if to take us beyond the frame. Often Whorf’s images are like this. They show a view from the shore toward the distance, creating a feeling of anticipation in us as we look outward and ponder where we might travel and what we might experience if we left our safety zones behind.
 

Whorf may have harbored such thoughts due to his own physical limitations. A result of a childhood injury, one of his legs was shorter than the other, and he was partially incapacitated. His works often evoke a yearning for travel and adventure, perhaps of a kind that were not within his own reach. Geese in Flight (pictured right, top) is another work, where the freedom of the geese taking flight into a shimming sky is contrasted with a strip of land stretching horizontally across the foreground, where we stand. Whorf’s use of watercolor to contrast the translucency of this sort of sky with shapes that are firmly and solidly positioned, such as boats and landforms, is notable. In Winter Landscape with Horse and Sled (right, bottom), Whorf used the white paper for the snow on the ground, while his ability to apply his brush with the certitude for which he was often praised is revealed in the succinct strokes he used to portray the ruts left by the wheels and horses of the carriage ahead of us on the road. The composition radiates from this tiny form, drawing our gaze to the curving lines of bare purple trees across the hills.

It was no doubt the robustness of Whorf’s handling that brought him the admiration of John Singer Sargent. Brought by his sister to Whorf’s first Boston exhibition, held in 1923, Sargent bought one of the young artist’s watercolors. We don’t know which one Sargent purchased, but maybe Sargent not only felt an affinity with his own watercolors in Whorf’s method, but also saw the way that like him, John Whorf was able to quickly seize and express the truth of a certain moment in time.