Homer, Winslow (1836-1910) painter, illustrator Winslow Homer is credited with originating an American vein of realism in depictions of genre scenes, the landscape, and the seascape. His was a muscular realism that celebrated the paint surface.
Born in Boston on February 24, 1836, Homer had a two-year apprenticeship with a lithographer, almost his only
The Unruly Calf, by Winslow Homer, 1875 (Library of Congress)
Formal training. In 1857 he began supporting himself as a freelance illustrator for magazines and newspapers, work he continued for 20 years. His images of the Civil War, which focused on the soldiers’ everyday camp life instead of the battlefield, received wide circulation. In 1866-67 he traveled to Paris, where he probably saw the work of early modernists such as Edouard Manet and Gustave Courbet. The color theorist Eugene Chevreul and Japanese art also influenced Homer. In the 1860s and 1870s he was an active figure in the New York art world, and his oils and watercol-ors found a ready market. Always an active outdoorsman, Homer chose, after 1884, to live much of his life in the relative isolation of Prout’s Neck, Maine, where he died on September 29, 1910.
Homer found his first success as a painter with genre scenes expressed in a distinctly American idiom. A series depicting public education included Snap the Whip (1872, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio), which shows boys playing that game in front of a one-room rural school house. The painting was widely exhibited and frequently engraved. Among the paintings derived from his work as a war correspondent was Prisoners from the Front (1866, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which depicts a young Union officer inspecting three Confederate captives, the dress, posture, and facial expressions of each conveying their rank and character. A decade later Homer revisited the South and perceptively painted recently freed slaves at work, The Cotton Pickers (1876, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and at leisure, Sunday Morning in Virginia (1877, Cincinnati Art Museum).
Homer often turned his attraction to dramatic landscapes and dramatic events in the landscape rendered dispassionately. He painted the sporting life in the Adiron-dacks: deer frantically swimming away from hunters, a fighting trout at the end of a line, and the rugged guides who made such scenes accessible to Homer and his patrons. Winters spent in Bermuda, Florida, and other warm places resulted in vivid watercolors. Some of his oils distill these outdoor experiences; for example, in The Fox Hunt (1893, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia), two crows and their quarry, a fox, are silhouetted against the snow; the canvas quotes Japanese prints as well as real life.
Homer is perhaps most well known for his seascapes. Many earlier genre scenes included the water; for example, Breezing Up (1876, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.), shows a group on a small sloop experiencing the exhilaration of a sail full of wind. From a 20-month stay in Cullercoats on the North Sea coast in England came many iconic depictions of fisherwomen and the sea. As time went on, his seascapes became stripped down to depictions of waves, rocks, and sky. Although works such as Northeaster (1895, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) fit comfortably into an international vogue for marine painting, Homer’s paintings were seen as being especially American in their vigor.
Further reading: Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
—Karen Zukowski
World History
