About this work
Four women stride across a rocky slope with the easy confidence of people entirely at home outdoors. Homer depicts four unaccompanied lady hikers on a steep stone slope in the Adirondacks — their figures distributed across the canvas in a grouping that feels caught rather than arranged. The composition tilts and angles with the terrain itself, and the light falls hard and clear, the way it does at altitude in summer. This work demonstrates Homer's interest in both dynamic asymmetrical compositions influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, which were becoming increasingly popular in the West, and the color effects of bright outdoor light. The palette is direct and unsentimentalized: grey-green stone, the warm earth tones of the women's walking dress, open sky — nothing glamorized, nothing softened.
Homer more than made up for relatively little early output in Keene Valley when he returned in 1877 and painted three major oils, one of which — *In the Mountains* — depicts four women hiking on Mount Hopkins near the valley.
Homer often painted women, but this is the sole instance of his doing so within the Adirondacks. That singularity matters. Beyond the scarcity of female models was the pervasive belief that paintings of life in the wilderness ought to depict sturdy local folk rather than fashionably attired female hikers — a convention Homer quietly disregards. Homer presents the women as young, affluent, independent, and self-assured — outside the domestic sphere , and in doing so he captures something genuinely new. Homer captures the new visions of women that surfaced during the post-war era women's rights movements. The painting is not a statement so much as an observation — which, in Homer's hands, is often more powerful.
*In the Mountains* belongs in a room where the outdoors is felt as much as seen — a study lined with books, a lodge with good north light, or a generous hallway where the eye needs something to travel into. Unlike members of the Hudson River School, whose depictions of the natural world were hyper-realistic and idealized, Homer sought to convey the spontaneity and veracity of nature — and that quality translates directly off the wall. This is a painting for someone who values quiet authority over decoration: a work that rewards looking slowly, and that carries the particular satisfaction of figures who know exactly where they're going.
