A second dramatic and harrowing picture finished at Prout’s Neck was “Undertow.” It is a rescue of two girl bathers by life-savers, something that the painter had seen in the surf at Atlantic City. It appealed to him. Why? Because it was beautiful in itself? Hardly that; but because it had great illustrative possibilities. There once more was the critical moment and the appealing interest. He could not resist such “copy” as that. But now in putting the picture together he is something more than a reporter of the fact. He embellishes the fact to make it not only more effective but more attractive. He places the figures on the canvas in a diagonal line that echoes the diagonal of the incoming wave at the back. The lines give a swing and surge forward not only to the sea but to the figures. The four figures are locked in a long chain--almost a death-grip--with clutching hands and arms and much use of angle lines. The angle lines repeat one another, interlock, and run on until the whole group is of a piece--moves as a piece. All this, of course, helps on the literary but it also indicates a growing sense of the pictorial. The four figures begin to have the monumental quality of a Greek pedimental group. The very sharpness of their drawing and the hardness of their texture seem to help out the plastic feeling. Homer seems rising to the difference between the merely illustrative and the picturesque in design; but his color sense stirs only sluggishly. The “Undertow” is pitched in neutral grays and greens, and one cannot rave over it. At this time the painter was spending his winter months not on the Maine coast but down in the Bahamas or Cuba or Bermuda. While in those places he did a great many water-colors--glimpses of palm and sand and sea with white houses glaring in the sun. They were done with much freedom, with a sense of blinding light, and some realization of color. The quality of mere “copy” drops out of them, or perhaps was never in them. They seem scraps of pictures, delightful glimpses of such pictorial features as sun and shade and bright hues. It looks from them as though Homer would finally emerge as a great painter and forget his early point of view. And at times he does. But he has lapses, and the bias of his early days returns to him.