“Hurley is a tiny village with a big history,” says Gail Whistance of the Hurley Heritage Society. Founded in 1662 and settled by Dutch immigrants, Hurley still preserves 26 of their stone houses. Its Main Street is a National Historic Landmark today, but was already considered historic by 1872. That year the New York Evening Post reported that Winslow Homer was in Hurley “sketching the quaint old Dutch interiors.”
Hurley residents have long been proud that “Snap the Whip,” one of Homer’s most famous paintings, depicts its one-room schoolhouse on Eagle’s Nest Road. Converted to a private residence, the schoolhouse still stands today. But it’s far from the only Hurley scene in Homer’s art. Sleuthing, however, was required to detect them, because Homer never kept a diary or shared more than the barest information about his life with biographers.
In 2016, Whistance, then a board member and exhibit curator for the Hurley Heritage Society, received an email from art historian Reilly Rhodes. As part of his research for a book, Rhodes hoped to identify the interior shown in one of Homer’s engravings. In “The Family Record,” a young mother and father make an entry in what appears to be the family Bible. Rhodes thought a painting on the wall behind them might be Pieter Vanderlyn’s 1743 portrait of Cornelius D. Wynkoop at age eight, held today in the Huntington Library’s collection in Pasadena, California. Could the room match one in the house built around 1725 by Cornelius Wynkoop’s father, Dirck Wynkoop?
Viola Opdahl, owner of the Wynkoop House, had recently given an oral history interview to then-town historian Doreen Lyke and Bruce Whistance, Gail’s husband, who also scanned Opdahl’s collection of vintage photographs. One, taken around 1890, shows a room inside the Wynkoop House. On the wall is a painting that matches the one in “The Family Record.” A slat-back chair in the style of Kingston’s Elting-Beekman shops appears identical to the chair where the father sits in the engraving, with a sword like the one pictured propped nearby.
The evidence confirmed that the Wynkoop House was where Homer sketched the scene for “The Family Record.” Other clues soon surfaced: landscapes echoing Hurley’s fields and hills, figures seated in the same style of chair, and a woman who appeared in multiple works. Though Rhodes searched baptism records to identify the young mother in “The Family Record” without success, he suspected Homer left such hints intentionally—inviting future generations to decode them. The findings became a new chapter in Rhodes’s 2017 book, “Winslow Homer: From Poetry to Fiction—The Engraved Works.”
The discoveries inspired Whistance to mount an exhibit on Homer’s Hurley art at the Hurley Heritage Society Museum. The museum couldn’t afford to insure original paintings, but it displayed high-quality reproductions alongside three original Homer engravings gifted by Rhodes, including “The Family Record.” When the exhibit opened in May 2019, it drew visitors “from well beyond Hurley,” Whistance recalls.
After pandemic closures in 2020, the museum kept the show running through 2022 before transitioning it online. The virtual exhibit remains live on the Hurley Heritage Society’s website, allowing anyone to compare Homer’s art with photographs of Hurley’s landscapes and interiors.Today, visitors can also see “The Family Record” in person as part of the museum’s current show, “The Wynkoop House: Inspiring the Arts Across the Centuries,” on view through October at 52 Main Street in Hurley, open Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m.
Margaret Tomlinson is a contributing writer. You can send her an email at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.