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Winslow Homer

 

(born Feb. 24, 1836, Boston, Mass., U.S. — died Sept. 29, 1910, Prouts Neck, Maine) U.S. painter. He served an apprenticeship with a Boston lithographer, then became a freelance illustrator in New York City. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1860 and was elected a member in 1865. During a stay in France in 1866, he was attracted to French naturalism and Japanese prints, but they had little effect on his generally bright and happy work. He became a master of watercolour and his ability as an oil painter matured; he focused increasingly on solitary, withdrawn figures. He spent 1881 – 82 in the English village of Tynemouth, on the North Sea, where the coastal atmosphere, the sea, and the stoic people are the subjects of some of his most powerful images. In 1883 he moved permanently to Prouts Neck, and his dominant theme became the sea and the endless struggle against an uncaring nature. In his later years he continued to paint vigorously and in near-total isolation. Though he was recognized in his lifetime as a leading U.S. painter, appreciation of his enormous achievement came only after his death.

For more information on Winslow Homer, visit Britannica.com.

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Art Encyclopedia: Winslow Homer
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(b Boston, MA, 24 Feb 1836; d Prout's Neck, ME, 29 Sept 1910). American painter, illustrator and etcher. He was one of the two most admired American late 19th-century artists (the other being Thomas Eakins) and is considered to be the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor life in the USA and its greatest watercolourist. Nominally a landscape painter, in a sense carrying on Hudson River school attitudes, Homer was an artist of power and individuality whose images are metaphors for the relationship of Man and Nature. A careful observer of visual reality, he was at the same time alive to the purely physical properties of pigment and colour, of line and form, and of the patterns they create. His work is characterized by bold, fluid brushwork, strong draughtsmanship and composition, and particularly by a lack of sentimentality.

See the Abbreviations for further details.



Biography: Winslow Homer
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Winslow Homer (1836-1910), a pioneer in naturalistic painting of the American scene, was the most versatile American artist of his period, with the widest range of subjects, styles, and mediums.

Of long New England ancestry, Winslow Homer was born in Boston on Feb. 24, 1836. Growing up in nearby Cambridge, he had an active outdoor boyhood that gave him a lifelong love of the country. From youth he was independent, and terse in speech, with a dry Yankee humor. He was almost entirely self-taught. About the age of 19 he was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer, but as soon as he became 21 he launched himself as an illustrator, especially for Harper's Weekly in New York.

Moving to New York in 1859, Homer free-lanced for Harper's, studied briefly at the National Academy of Design, and took a few private lessons in painting. During the Civil War he went to the Virginia front several times for Harper's. His illustrations of the 1860s and 1870s, notable for their realism, strong draftsmanship, and fine design, rank among the best graphic art of their time in America.

But an illustrator's career did not satisfy Homer. In 1862 he produced his first adult paintings. After the war he turned to the subject matter he always preferred, contemporary country life: summer resorts with their fashionable, comely young women; the simpler life of the farm; and the joys of childhood in the country. These early works, combining utter fidelity to the native scene with reserved idyllic poetry, form the most authentic and delightful pictorial record of rural America in the 1860s and 1870s.

From the first, Homer's work was based on direct observation of nature. Disregarding traditional styles, he put down his firsthand visual sensations of outdoor light and color. This fresh vision was combined with an instinctive feeling for decorative values and the sensuous qualities of color, line, and pigment. In these respects his work paralleled early French impressionism, but without any possible influence. Not until he was 30 did he go abroad, in late 1866, for 10 months in France, not studying but painting on his own. This experience had relatively little influence on his art.

In 1873 Homer took up a new medium, watercolor, which proved perfectly suited to his basically graphic style and which soon became as important to him as oil. Probably because of the modest success of his watercolors, after 1875 he gave up illustrating, except occasionally.

A decisive change in Homer's career came in 1881 and 1882, when he spent two seasons in England, near Tynemouth, a fishing port on the stormy North Sea. Working almost entirely in watercolor, he first began to picture the sea and the hardy men and women who made their living on it. These watercolors showed a new seriousness and depth of feeling and a great technical advance in atmospheric quality, deeper color, and rounder modeling.

In 1883 Homer left New York for good and settled in a lonely spot on the Maine coast, Prout's Neck. On the rocky shore he built a studio which was his home for the rest of his life. He lived alone, doing his own cooking and housework; he sometimes remained through the hard Maine winters. Always reticent about personal matters, Homer never divulged his reasons for this withdrawal from civilization. There had been an unhappy love affair some years before, and he had never married. But regardless of this, he had found the subjects that meant most to him. There was no element of defeat in his withdrawal; his letters to his family prove that his way of living was genuinely satisfying. "The life that I have chosen, " he once wrote, "gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The Sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks."

From this time Homer's art changed fundamentally. His themes now were the sea, the forest, the mountains, and the lives of sailors, fishermen, and hunters. His style became sure, powerful, and skilled, and within a few years he had attained full maturity. The first fruits of this growth were a series of marine paintings, including Eight Bells and The Fog Warning, which are pictorial classics of the sea.

The success of his sea paintings led Homer to embark on a new medium, etching. Seven of the eight plates he etched between 1884 and 1889 were based on these paintings and his English watercolors, but with changes that make them among the best designed of any of his works, and among the strongest 19th-century American prints. However, they failed to sell, and he abandoned etching after 1889.

As the years passed at Prout's Neck, Homer's dominant theme became the sea itself. It was the ocean at its stormiest that he loved. His marines take us right into the battlefront between sea and shore, making us feel the weight and movement of the wave, the solidity of the rock, the impact of their collision. In other moods they show us the radiance of dawn or sunset over the water. These marines are supreme expressions of the power, danger, and beauty of the sea.

Homer seldom discussed esthetic matters, and his few recorded statements express a straight naturalistic viewpoint. Although he once said; "When I have selected the thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears, " his work itself gives ample evidence to the contrary. He simplified severely, concentrating on the large forms and movements. In his mature works, naturalism and decorative values achieved a synthesis; the balance of masses, the strong linear rhythms, and the robust earthy color harmonies were evidently the product of well-considered design.

Homer's purest artistic achievements, aside from his mature oils, were his later watercolors. Almost every year he and his elder brother Charles, both outdoor men, made camping visits to the northern woods - the Adirondacks and Quebec. Here Homer painted scores of watercolors which captured the unspoiled beauty of the wilderness with a vividness and force new in American painting. Their command of line and color and their unerring rightness of design present interesting parallels with the decorative values of Oriental art.

From the late 1890s Homer spent part of most winters in the Bahamas, Florida, or Bermuda. The West Indies revealed to him a new world of light and color. He romanticized the lives of blacks in the Bahamas in a series of superb watercolors that attained the highest brilliancy in all his work. These late watercolors, whether southern or northern, were the purest expressions of his visual delight in the external world. They contain the essence of his genius - the direct impact of nature on the artist's eye, recorded in all its purity by the hand of a master.

In old age Homer was generally considered the foremost painter living in America, and he received many honors. All his important oils were sold during his lifetime. None of this made any difference in the quantity or quality of his works or in his solitary way of living. He died at Prout's Neck on Sept. 29, 1910.

Homer was the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor life in 19th-century America. In his energy, his wide range, the pristine freshness of his vision, and his simple sensuous vitality, he expressed certain aspects of the American spirit as no preceding artist had.

Further Reading

Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (1944), based on Homer's letters, previously unpublished material, and a record of his works, is the most complete biography and critique. Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, Winslow Homer: American Artist (1961), presents interesting but questionable theories about Homer's relation to French and Japanese art. Philip C. Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout's Neck (1966), includes new, firsthand information on his life in Maine. James Thomas Flexner, The World of Winslow Homer (1966), places him in the context of American art of his period. Special aspects of his art are covered in Lloyd Goodrich, The Graphic Art of Winslow Homer (1968) and Winslow Homer's America (1969), and in Donelson F. Hoopes, Winslow Homer Watercolors (1969).

Additional Sources

Cikovsky, Nicolai, Winslow Homer, New York: Abrams, 1990.

Downes, William Howe, The life and works of Winslow Homer, New York, B. Franklin 1974; New York: Dover Publications, 1989.

Hendricks, Gordon, The life and work of Winslow Homer, New York: H. N. Abrams, 1979.

US History Companion: Homer, Winslow
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(1836-1910), painter. Homer, essentially a self-taught artist, began his career as a magazine illustrator in the Boston area. In 1859 he went to New York and attended classes at the National Academy of Design. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Harper's Weekly sent him to Washington. He drew for the magazine a variety of subjects in the capital city and nearby theaters of war, working in a clear, direct style that commanded a significant audience. But he was not a mere realist, and his drawings conveyed a clear sense of their subjects' characters.

Most young American artists of his time went abroad to enroll in European art schools for formal technical training, but Homer went his independent way. He visited France briefly in 1866, but the trip did not alter his style. In the next few years he painted genre scenes, people at work and play, and individual character studies. His view was usually simple, often romantic if not sentimental, and executed in a direct manner without the suavity of the highly trained artists who commanded public attention.

In 1881-1882 while living near Tynemouth on the north coast of England, he became deeply interested in the types of people who lived by the sea and in the immense forces of the sea itself. By 1883 he had settled permanently at Prout's Neck, Maine, where he worked in isolation. He sensed that this contact with elemental life would strengthen his work and prevent him from becoming merely another successful artist.

"If a man wants to become an artist," Homer once said, "he should never look at paintings." Now his work changed fundamentally, as he focused on human confrontations with an unrelenting sea and on basic natural forces. In The Life Line (1884), he depicted a rescue at sea, with dramatic if idealized human types. Eight Bells (1886) shows two sailors calmly taking readings at a ship's rail while beyond them nature displays its powers on the water and in the sky. In Lost on the Grand Banks (1886), he caught a fisherman's anxiety as fog obscures the way home.

By the late 1880s, Homer was recognized as a preeminent marine painter, a reputation he enhanced with a variety of subjects drawn from the Caribbean where he often wintered. His most famous painting may be The Gulf Stream (1899), which shows a black man in a battered boat, who has survived a storm. He was equally effective in portraying the struggle for existence and the confrontations with nature in the snowy woods of his harsh winter environment. Homer was doubtless a Darwinist, but he focused on the heroic struggles of men and animals with a powerful regard for individuality, whatever the outcome.

Although Homer did not move among artists or figure in the social scene, he was honored in his last years. His skills steadily sharpened to accommodate his great views of human beings and nature. Homer continued to work in oil and helped make watercolor a major art medium in America.

Homer embodied many national ideals. He was self-made, independent, stubbornly committed to truth as well as to the facts of appearance, always determined not to submit to any popular taste that demanded easy or pretty solutions. Both the man and his works have become national icons.

Bibliography:

James Thomas Flexner, The World of Winslow Homer (1969); Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (1959).

Author:

H. Wayne Morgan

See also Painting and Sculpture.


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Winslow Homer
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Homer, Winslow, 1836-1910, American landscape, marine, and genre painter. Homer was born in Boston, where he later worked as a lithographer and illustrator. In 1861 he was sent to the Civil War battlefront as correspondent for Harper's Weekly, his work winning international acclaim. Many of his studies of everyday life, such as Snap the Whip (1872, Metropolitan Mus.), date from the postwar period, during which he was a popular magazine illustrator. In 1876, Homer abandoned illustration to devote himself to painting. He found his inspiration in the American scene and, eventually, in the sea, which he painted at Prouts Neck, Maine, in the summer and in Key West, Fla., or the Bahamas in the winter. After 1884 he lived the life of a recluse.

Although Homer excelled above all as a watercolorist, his oils and watercolors alike are characterized by directness, realism, objectivity, and splendid color. His powerful and dramatic interpretations of the sea in watercolor have never been surpassed and hold a unique place in American art. They are in leading museums throughout the United States. Characteristic watercolors are Breaking Storm and Maine Coast (both: Art Inst. of Chicago) and The Hurricane (Metropolitan Mus.). Characteristic oils include The Gulf Stream (1899) and Moonlight-Wood's Island Light (both: Metropolitan Mus.) and Eight Bells (1886; Addison Gall., Andover, Mass.).

Bibliography

See biographies by P. C. Beam (1966), J. Wilmerding (1972), and M. Judge (1986); studies by L. Goodrich (1968 and 1972); B. Gelman, ed., The Wood Engravings of Winslow Homer (1969); studies of his watercolors by D. Hoopes (1969), P. C. Beam (1983), H. A. Cooper (1987), M. Unger (2001), and R. C. Griffin (2006).

Fine Arts Dictionary: Homer, Winslow
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An American painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known especially for his rich watercolor paintings of sea scenes.

Wikipedia: Winslow Homer
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Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer, at the National Gallery of Art,
New York City, 1880,
photo by Napoleon Sarony (1821 – 1896)
Birth name Winslow Homer
Born February 24, 1836(1836-02-24)
Boston, Massachusetts
Died September 29, 1910
(aged 74)
Prout's Neck, Maine
Nationality American
Field Drawing
Wood engraving
Oil painting
Watercolor painting
Training Lithography apprenticeship, 1855-56
National Academy of Design (painting), 1863
Paris, France (informal), 1867
Movement Realism
Works Harper's Weekly Magazine
Ballou's Pictorial Magazine
Influenced Frederic Remington
Robert Henri
Howard Pyle
N. C. Wyeth

Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art.

Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator.[1] He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium. He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.[2][3]

Contents

Early life

The Bathers, wood engraving, Harper's Weekly, 1873

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836, Homer was the second of three sons of Charles Savage Homer and Henrietta Benson Homer, both from long lines of New Englanders. His mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist and Homer’s first teacher, and she and her son had a close relationship throughout their lives. Homer took on many of her traits, including her quiet, strong-willed, terse, sociable nature; her dry sense of humor; and her artistic talent.[4] Homer had a happy childhood, growing up mostly in then rural Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was an average student, but his art talent was on display early.

Homer’s father was a volatile, restless businessman who was always looking to “make a killing”. When Homer was thirteen, Charles gave up the hardware store business to seek a fortune in the California gold rush. When that failed, Charles left his family and went to Europe to raise capital for other get-rich-quick schemes that didn’t materialize.[5]

After Homer’s high school graduation, his father saw an ad in the newspaper and arranged for an apprenticeship. Homer’s apprenticeship to a Boston commercial lithographer at the age of 19, was a formative but “treadmill experience”.[6] He worked repetitively on sheet music covers and other commercial work for two years. By 1857, his freelance career was underway after he turned down an offer to join the staff of Harper's Weekly. “From the time I took my nose off that lithographic stone”, Homer later stated, “I have had no master, and never shall have any.” [7]

Homer’s career as an illustrator lasted nearly twenty years. He contributed to magazines such as Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly, at a time when the market for illustrations was growing rapidly, and when fads and fashions were changing quickly. His early works, mostly commercial engravings of urban and country social scenes, are characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrast of light and dark, and lively figure groupings — qualities that remained important throughout his career.[8] His quick success was mostly due to this strong understanding of graphic design and also to the adaptability of his designs to wood engraving.

Gallery

Unlike many artists who were well-known for working in only one art medium, Winslow Homer was prominent in a variety of art media, as in the following examples:

Homer's studio

In 1859, he opened a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, the artistic and publishing capital of the United States. Until 1863 he attended classes at the National Academy of Design, and studied briefly with Frédéric Rondel, who taught him the basics of painting.[10] In only about a year of self-training, Homer was producing excellent oil work. His mother tried to raise family funds to send him to Europe for further study but instead Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), where he sketched battle scenes and camp life, the quiet moments as well as the murderous ones.[11] His initial sketches were of the camp, commanders, and army of the famous Union officer, Major General George B. McClellan, at the banks of the Potomac River in October, 1861.

Thanksgiving in Camp, wood engraving, Harper's Weekly, 1862
Two Are Company, Three Are None, wood engraving, Harper's Weekly, 1872

Although the drawings did not get much attention at the time, they mark Homer's expanding skills from illustrator to painter. Like with his urban scenes, Homer also illustrated women during war time, and showed the effects of the war on the home front. The war work was dangerous and exhausting. Back at his studio, however, Homer would regain his strength and re-focus his artistic vision. He set to work on a series of war-related paintings based on his sketches, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty (1862), Home, Sweet Home (1863), and Prisoners from the Front (1866).[12] He exhibited Home, Sweet Home at the National Academy and its remarkable critical reception resulted in its quick sale and in the artist being elected an Associate Academician, then a full Academician in 1865.[10] After the war, Homer turned his attention primarily to scenes of childhood and young women, reflecting his own, and the country’s, nostalgia for simpler times.

At nearly the beginning of his painting career, the twenty-seven year old Homer demonstrated a maturity of feeling, depth of perception, and mastery of technique which was immediately recognized. His realism was objective, true to nature, and emotionally controlled. One critic wrote, “Winslow Homer is one of those few young artists who make a decided impression of their power with their very first contributions to the Academy...He at this moment wields a better pencil, models better, colors better, than many whom, were it not improper, we could mention as regular contributors to the Academy.” And of Home, Sweet Home specifically, “There is no clap-trap about it. The delicacy and strength of emotion which reign throughout this little picture are not surpassed in the whole exhibition.” “It is a work of real feeling, soldiers in camp listening to the evening band, and thinking of the wives and darlings far away. There is no strained effect in it, no sentimentality, but a hearty, homely actuality, broadly, freely, and simply worked out.” [12]

Early landscapes and watercolors

Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 1868, oil on panel (Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine)[13]

After exhibiting at the National Academy of Design, Homer finally traveled to Paris, France in 1867 where he remained for a year. His most praised early painting, Prisoners from the Front, was on exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris at the same time.[12] He did not study formally but he practiced landscape painting while continuing to work for Harper's, depicting scenes of Parisian life.

Homer painted about a dozen small paintings during the stay. Although he arrived in France at a time of new fashions in art, Homer’s main subject for his paintings was peasant life, showing more of an alignment with the established French Barbizon school and the artist Millet, then with newer artists Manet and Courbet. Though his interest in depicting natural light parallels that of the early impressionists, there is no evidence of direct influence as he was already a plein-air painter in America and had already evolved a personal style which was much closer to Manet than Monet. Unfortunately, Homer was very private about his personal life and his methods (even denying his first biographer any personal information or commentary), but his stance was clearly one of independence of style and a devotion to American subjects. As his fellow artist Eugene Benson wrote, Homer believed that artists “should never look at pictures” but should “stutter in a language of their own.” [14]

Throughout the 1870s Homer continued painting mostly rural or idyllic scenes of farm life, children playing, and young adults courting, including Country School (1871) and The Morning Bell (1872). In 1875, Homer quit working as a commercial illustrator and vowed to survive on his paintings and watercolors alone. Despite his excellent critical reputation, his finances continued to remain precarious.[15] His popular 1872 painting, Snap-the-Whip, was exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as was one of his finest and most famous paintings Breezing Up (1876). Of his work at this time, Henry James wrote:

Breezing Up (A Fair Wind),
1876, oil on canvas
(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)[16]
"We frankly confess that we detest his subjects...he has chosen the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial...and, to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded." [17]

Many disagreed with James. Breezing Up, Homer’s iconic painting of a father and three boys out for a spirited sail, received wide praise. The New York Tribune wrote, “There is no picture in this exhibition, nor can we remember when there has been a picture in any exhibition, that can be named alongside this.” Visits to Petersburg, Virginia around 1876 resulted in paintings of rural African American life. The same straightforward sensibility which allowed Homer to distill art from these potentially sentimental subjects also yielded the most unaffected views of African American life at the time, as illustrated in Dressing for the Carnival (1877) and A Visit from the Old Mistress (1876).[18]

In 1877, Homer exhibited for the first time at the Boston Art Club with the oil painting, An Afternoon Sun, (owned by the Artist). From 1877 through 1909 Homer exhibited often at the Boston Art Club. Works on paper, both drawings and watercolors, were frequently exhibited by Homer beginning in 1882. A most unusual sculpture by the Artist, Hunter with Dog - Northwoods, was exhibited in 1902. By that year Homer had switched his primary Gallery from the Boston based Doll and Richards to the New York City based Knoedler & Co.

Homer became a member of The Tile Club, a group of artists and writers who met frequently to exchange ideas and organize outings for painting, as well as foster the creation of decorative tiles. For a short time, he designed tiles for fireplaces.[19] Homer's nickname in The Tile Club was "The Obtuse Bard". Other well known Tilers were painters William Merritt Chase, Arthur Quartley, and the sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens.

Cloud Shadows, 1890, oil on canvas (Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence)[20]

Homer started painting with watercolors on a regular basis in 1873 during a summer stay in Gloucester, Massachusetts. From the beginning, his technique was natural, fluid and confident, demonstrating his innate talent for a difficult medium. His impact would be revolutionary. Here, again, the critics were puzzled at first, "A child with an ink bottle could not have done worse."[21] Another critic said that Homer “made a sudden and desperate plunge into water color painting”. But his watercolors proved popular and enduring, and sold more readily, improving his financial condition considerably. They varied from highly detailed (Blackboard – 1877) to broadly impressionistic (Schooner at Sunset – 1880). Some watercolors were made as preparatory sketches for oil paintings (as for “Breezing Up”) and some as finished works in themselves. Thereafter, he seldom traveled without paper, brushes and water based paints.[22]

As a result of disappointments with women or from some other emotional turmoil, Homer became reclusive in the late 1870s, no longer enjoying urban social life and living instead in Gloucester. For a while, he even lived in secluded Eastern Point Lighthouse (with the keeper’s family). In re-establishing his love of the sea, Homer found a rich source of themes while closely observing the fishermen, the sea, and the marine weather. After 1880, he rarely featured genteel women at leisure, focusing instead on working women.[23]

England

Fisherwomen, Cullercoats, graphite and watercolor on paper 1881, Honolulu Academy of Arts

Homer spent two years (1881 – 1882) in the English coastal village of Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear. Many of the paintings at Cullercoats took as their subjects working men and women and their daily heroism, imbued with a solidity and sobriety which was new to Homer's art, presaging the direction of his future work. He wrote, “The women are the working bees. Stout hardy creatures.” [24] His palette became constrained and sober; his paintings larger, more ambitious, and more deliberately conceived and executed. His subjects more universal and less nationalistic, more heroic by virtue of his unsentimental rendering. Although he moved away from the spontaneity and bright innocence of the American paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, Homer found a new style and vision which carried his talent into new realms.[25]

Maine and maturity

Sunlight on the Coast, 1890
(Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio)[26]

Back in the U.S. in November 1882, Homer showed his English watercolors in New York. Critics noticed the change in style at once, “He is a very different Homer from the one we knew in days gone by”, now his pictures “touch a far higher plane...They are works of High Art.” [27] Homer’s women were no longer “dolls who flaunt their millinery” but “sturdy, fearless, fit wives and mothers of men” who are fully capable of enduring the forces and vagaries of nature along side their men. [28]

In 1883, Homer moved to Prout's Neck, Maine (in Scarborough) and lived at his family’s estate in the remodeled carriage house just seventy-five feet from the ocean.[29] During the rest of the mid-1880s, Homer painted his monumental sea scenes. In Undertow (1886), depicting the dramatic rescue of two female bathers by two male lifeguards, Homer’s figures “have the weight and authority of classical figures”.[30] In Eight Bells (1886), two sailors carefully take their bearings on deck, calmly appraising their position and by extension, their relationship with the sea; they are confident in their seamanship but respectful of the forces before them. Other notable paintings among these dramatic struggle-with-nature images are Banks Fisherman, The Gulf Stream, Rum Cay, Mending the Nets, and Searchlight, Harbor Entrance, Santiago de Cuba. Some of these he repeated as etchings.[31]

At fifty years of age, Homer had become a “Yankee Robinson Crusoe, cloistered on his art island” and “a hermit with a brush”. These paintings established Homer, as the New York Evening Post wrote, “in a place by himself as the most original and one of the strongest of American painters.” [29] But despite his critical recognition, Homer’s work never achieved the popularity of traditional Salon pictures or of the flattering portraits by John Singer Sargent. Many of the sea pictures took years to sell and Undertow only earned him $400.[32]

In these years, Homer received emotional sustenance primarily from his mother, brother Charles, and sister-in-law Martha (“Mattie”). After his mother’s death, Homer became a “parent” for his aging but domineering father and Mattie became his closest female intimate.[33] In the winters of 1884-5, Homer ventured to warmer locations in Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas, and did a series of watercolors as part of a commission for Century Magazine. He replaced the turbulent green storm-tossed sea of Prout’s Neck with the sparkling blue skies of the Caribbean, and the hardy New Englanders with the leisurely Black natives, further expanding his watercolor technique, subject matter, and palette.[34] His tropical stays inspired and refreshed him in much the same way as Paul Gauguin’s trips to Tahiti.[35]A Garden in Nassau (1885) is one of the best examples of these watercolors. Once again, his freshness and originality were praised by critics, but proved too advanced for the traditional art buyers and he “looked in vain for profits.” Homer lived frugally, however, and fortunately, his affluent brother Charles provided financial help when needed.[36]

Additionally, Homer found inspiration in a number of summer trips to the North Woods Club, near the hamlet of Minerva, New York in the Adirondack Mountains. It was on these fishing vacations that he experimented freely with the watercolor medium, producing works of the utmost vigor and subtlety, hymns to solitude, nature, and to outdoor life. Homer doesn’t shrink from the savagery of blood sports nor the struggle for survival. The color effects are boldly and facilely applied. In terms of quality and invention, Homer's achievements as a watercolorist are unparalleled: "Homer had used his singular vision and manner of painting to create a body of work that has not been matched." [37]

In 1893, Homer painted one of his most famous “Darwinian” works, The Fox Hunt, which depicts a flock of starving crows descending on a fox slowed by deep snow. This was Homer’s largest painting and it was immediately purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, his first painting in a major American museum collection.[38] In Huntsman and Dogs (1891), a lone, impassive hunter, with his yelping dogs at his side, heads home after a hunt, with deer skins slung over his right shoulder. Another late work, The Gulf Stream (1899), shows a Black sailor adrift in a damaged boat, surrounded by sharks and an impending maelstrom. [39]

By 1900, Homer finally reached financial stability, as his paintings fetched good prices from museums and he began to receive rents from real estate properties. He also became free of the responsibilities of caring for his father who had died two years earlier.[40] Homer continued producing excellent watercolors, mostly on trips to Canada and the Caribbean. Other late works include seascapes absent of human figures, mostly of waves crashing against rocks in varying light. In his last decade, he at times followed the advice he gave a student artist in 1907, “Leave rocks for your old age—they’re easy”.[41]

Homer died in 1910 at the age of 74 in his Prout's Neck studio and was interred in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His painting, Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River, remains unfinished.

His Prout's Neck studio is now owned by the Portland Museum of Art.[42]

Influence

Rowing Home, 1890, watercolor
(Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.)

Homer never taught in a school or privately, as did Thomas Eakins, but his works strongly influenced succeeding generations of American painters for their direct and energetic interpretation of man's stoic relationship to an often neutral and sometimes harsh wilderness.[43] Robert Henri called Homer's work an "integrity of nature."[44]

American illustrator and teacher Howard Pyle revered Homer and encouraged his students to study him. His student and fellow illustrator, N. C. Wyeth (and through him Andrew Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth), shared the influence and appreciation, even following Homer to Maine for inspiration.[45] The elder Wyeth’s respect for his antecedent was “intense and absolute,” and can be observed in his early work Mowing (1907).[46] Perhaps Homer's austere individualism is best captured in his admonition to artists:

"Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems."

References

  1. ^ Poole, Robert M. Hidden Depths. Smithsonian Magazine. April 2008. Retrieved 22 May 2008.
  2. ^ Cooper, Helen A., Winslow Homer Watercolors, p. 16. Yale University Press, 1986.
  3. ^ * Hoeber, Arthur (February 1911). "Winslow Homer, A Painter Of The Sea". The World's Work: A History of Our Time XXI: 14009-14017. 
  4. ^ Cooper, p. 16.
  5. ^ Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002, p. 9, ISBN 0-520-22725-5.
  6. ^ Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Winslow Homer, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1990, pp. 11-13, ISBN 0-8109-1193-0
  7. ^ Johns (2002), p. 13.
  8. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 12
  9. ^ After the Hurricane at The Art Institute of Chicago
  10. ^ a b Cooper, p. 13.
  11. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 15.
  12. ^ a b c Cikovsky (1990), p. 16.
  13. ^ Artists Sketching the the White Mountains at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine
  14. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 32, 42.
  15. ^ Johns (2002), p. 84.
  16. ^ Breezing Up at the National Gallery of Art
  17. ^ Quoted by Updike, John: "Epic Homer", Still Looking: Essays on American Art, p. 58. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
  18. ^ Updike, John, page 69, 2005. "Among his feats may be listed the best, least caricatural portraits of postbellum African Americans,"
  19. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 65.
  20. ^ Cloud Shadows at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas
  21. ^ Rough Notes on the Exhibition of the American Water Color Society for 1881, "Andrews' American Queen", page 110. February 12, 1881.
  22. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 57.
  23. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 72.
  24. ^ Johns (2002), p. 98.
  25. ^ Cikovsky (1990), pp. 75-79.
  26. ^ Sunlight on the Coast at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
  27. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 81.
  28. ^ Johns (2002), p. 105.
  29. ^ a b Cikovsky (1990), p. 91.
  30. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 84.
  31. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 94.
  32. ^ Johns (2002), p. 122.
  33. ^ Johns (2002), p. 114.
  34. ^ Johns (2002), p. 124.
  35. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 100.
  36. ^ Johns (2002), pp. 127-128.
  37. ^ Walsh, Judith: "Innovation in Homer's Late Watercolors", Winslow Homer, page 283. National Gallery of Art, 1995.
  38. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 115.
  39. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 120.
  40. ^ Johns (2002), pp. 127-150.
  41. ^ Cikovsky (1990), p. 131.
  42. ^ Portland Museum
  43. ^ See Lost on the Grand Banks, collection of Bill Gates
  44. ^ Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, Harper Collins, 1984
  45. ^ An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art, New York Graphic Society, 1987, p. 68, ISBN 0-8212-1652-X.
  46. ^ Wyeth (1987), p. 38.

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