Up to this time Homer had not painted a single epoch-making picture. As Kenyon Cox quite truly says, had he died at forty he would have been unknown to fame. One might draw out the number of years and make them fifty without extravagance of statement. Indeed, it was not until he was sixty that he began to paint his pictures of barren coast and sea upon which his enduring fame must rest, though before that he had given indication in many pictures of fisherfolk, whither he was trending. The blood of his sailor ancestors was coming to the fore at last, and the sea was to be his main theme thereafter. If we believe in genius that is born rather than made, then that, too, began to crop out in his later life. He went to Tynemouth, England, in 1881, and stayed there for two years in close contact with the fisher people of the coast. This produced a decided change in his art. The large, robust type of English fisher lass, the strongly built sailor in oilskins, appealed to him and remained with him. They were rugged, forceful people that well met his hard drawing and severe brush. There, too, he began picturing the gray sky and mist and sea of England. The heavy atmosphere that hangs like a pall upon the North Sea in stormy weather caught his fancy, and the gray-blue, gray-green waters gave him a new idea of color. The old airless, brick-colored picture of his early days was never taken up again. He dropped readily into cool grays, which in themselves were perhaps no nearer a fine color-harmony than his earlier hot colors, but at the least they were neutral and they were emphatically true of the sea in its stormy phases. Even Homer’s rigid method of painting began to break a little at Tynemouth. He was working then in water-colors, and perhaps the lighter medium lent itself more readily to a freer handling. His brush loosened, his drawing seemed less angular, less emphasized in outline, and his composition became more a matter of selection and adjustment than of mere accidental appearance.