Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer (born February 24, 1836, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 29, 1910, Prouts Neck, Maine) was an American painter whose works, particularly those on marine subjects, are among the most powerful and expressive of late 19th-century American art. His mastery of sketching and watercolour lends to his oil paintings the invigorating spontaneity of direct observation from nature (e.g., in The Gulf Stream, 1899). His subjects, often deceptively simple on the surface, dealt in their most-serious moments with the theme of human struggle within an indifferent universe.

Early life and work

Homer was born into an old New England family. When he was six, the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, then a rural village, where he enjoyed a happy country childhood. His artistic inclinations were encouraged by his mother, an amateur painter. When he was 19, he was apprenticed to the lithographic firm of John Bufford in Boston. At first most of his work involved copying the designs of other artists, but within a few years he was submitting his own drawings for publication in such periodicals as Ballou’s Pictorial and Harper’s Weekly. In 1859 Homer moved from Boston to New York City to begin a career as a freelance illustrator. The following year he exhibited his first paintings at the National Academy of Design, New York.

With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Homer made drawings at the front for Harper’s, but, unlike most artist-correspondents, he dealt more often with views of everyday camp life than with scenes of battle. As the war dragged on, he concentrated increasingly on painting. In 1865 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Admirably capturing the dominant national mood of reconciliation, his Prisoners from the Front (1866) was warmly received when exhibited at the academy shortly after the war ended.

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Although Homer’s studio was in New York City, the city was rarely his theme. During the warm months he traveled to Pennsylvania, the Hudson River valley, and New England, camping, hunting, fishing, and sketching. In 1866 he went to France for about a year. Although influenced by French naturalism, Japanese prints, and contemporary fashion illustration, his work after his return to America did not change markedly, except that his palette was generally somewhat brighter. Such early pictures as Long Branch, New Jersey (1869) and Snap the Whip (1872) depict happy scenes, the former of fashionable ladies promenading along the seashore and the latter of children frolicking in a meadow after school. In a few early pictures a disquieting note of human isolation is struck, premonitory of Homer’s later, more-powerful work.

Adoption of watercolour and artistic development

In 1873 Homer began to work in watercolour, which allowed him to make rapid, fresh observations of nature. In that demanding medium, he explored and resolved new artistic problems, and his oil paintings of the next few years, such as Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (1873–76), reflect the invigorating effect of watercolour.

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Homer matured slowly as an artist, but his development was constant. With the passage of years his oil paintings became larger, his figures more solitary, his concern for naturalistic detail greater. He painted many women, increasingly as single figures, intimate, withdrawn, feminine. From the late 1870s Homer began to devote his summers exclusively to direct painting from nature in watercolour. Greater concern for atmospheric effects and reflected light added complexity to the images but at the same time enabled him to achieve greater pictorial unity.

Although Homer received some recognition during his early years, he had not had any real success by mid-career. By 1880 he began to show signs of increasingly antisocial behaviour, deliberately shunning the company of other people. In 1881 he unexpectedly went to England, where he spent about two years sketching and painting in Cullercoats, a remote fishing port on the North Sea. There, at age 45, his period of greatest artistic growth began. He was intrigued by the life of the hardy fisherfolk of Cullercoats, who struggled against the sea to earn their livelihood, but he did not paint that struggle directly. He depicted instead the robust women of the town, who mended the nets and kept house while the men were out at sea. The English coastal atmosphere posed a new and difficult artistic challenge, but Homer mastered the diffused light, limited in colour but infinitely varied in tone, in a series of subtle watercolours.

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