During Winslow Homer's most productive years, a Maine cottage by the ocean gave the artist sanctuary.

By ROBERT M. POOLE

By late November, the grand summer houses at Prout's Neck, Maine, a few miles south of Portland, are empty of life, with pipes drained, flags down, families scattered. The voice of the ocean takes over, waves thudding along granite cliffs now slick with mist. On the deserted beach road, some workmen try to get in a few more licks—fitting cedar shingles, brushing on paint—before darkness overtakes them. But the light soon fades and they go rattling off toward town in their pickups, leaving the small green cottage at 5 Winslow Homer Road to the shadows.

The cottage, where the artist Winslow Homer lived and worked during the most productive years of his long life (1836-1910), seems quite modest by Prout's Neck standards, which tend toward the monumental. Indeed, it would be easy for a visitor walking the cliffs to miss Homer's place, which is so well suited to its surroundings that it seems almost organic, rising against the sky as little more than a dark hump among thickets of wild roses, beach plums, and barberries. Like the painter who lived there, the cottage is the essence of Yankee understatement, first built as a carriage house, probably just after the Civil War. The artist claimed it as his bachelor's quarters about 1883, surrounded by the pounding seas and authentic characters he would immortalize in watercolors and oils.

A few months ago, I heard that the cottage was being restored and repainted, a good enough excuse to abandon Washington, D.C., for a much-needed dose of Maine air. After my cramped ride north, a brisk walk from the Black Point Inn to Homer's studio proved a welcome release, despite the approaching dusk and slippery footing along the cliffs. The workers' taillights melted in the distance just as I arrived, affording me free run of a place I had come to love a few years ago while researching a Homer biography.

In the uncertain twilight, the lines of the little house looked unchanged. It faced the sea squarely, one main room stacked atop the other. A newer studio, dating from 1890, was built as an addition on the back; a kitchen and dining room from the 1940s extended from the south side. The most striking features—a mansard roof and a sturdy piazza, or porch, wrapped halfway round the building's second floor—gave the cottage its top-heavy profile. The design, a collaboration between Homer and a young Portland architect named John Calvin Stevens, transformed the stable into a home that the artist praised to anyone who would listen: “It's very strong,” he wrote to his sister-in-law, Mattie Homer, as construction neared completion. “The piazza is braced so as to hold a complete Sunday school picknick.”

Robert M. Poole wrote about Winslow Homer in 1998 for National Geographic, from which he retired last year as executive editor.

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