The Rapids, Hudson River, Adirondacks

When executing The Rapids, Hudson River, Adirondacks (figure b), Homer used his knife with great dexterity, drawing upon a range of techniques. To capture the bubbling foam of Whitewater charging over and around boulders, he scraped one-centimeter-wide round marks out of the pink and yellow washes (see figure a). Scraping is well suited to such effects; indeed, the author of one English watercolor manual wrote that, when painting running streams, the knife “produces the effect of …