Winslow Homer and Women’s Bathing Practices in Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide)

Abstract

Winslow Homer’s Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide) has been treated by art historians over the past fifty years as an unsettling and mysterious painting, one that does not meet expectations of a conventional seashore scene. Critics at the National Academy of Design’s spring 1870 exhibition reacted in a similar way when they objected to the overt depiction of women in wet bathing costumes and with undone hair. When the publishers of the family-oriented magazine Every Saturday ran the engraving based on the painting three months after the exhibition, they covered the women’s exposed legs with trousers, to avoid a scandal. This article argues that although the image of women in bathing outfits on the beach may have been disturbing within the exhibition setting, Homer’s representation of bathing culture of the period was well within the bounds of acceptability. Ladies’ magazines, as well as newspapers, regularly included fashion plates and features about resort life that relate to the women Homer depicts. This article situates Eagle Head within the context of seaside bathing, dress, and hair practices of the early 1870s and as an extension of Homer’s early magazine illustrations. This contextualization reestablishes the normacly of Eagle Head, departing from readings of the painting as an impenetrable oddity.