Winslow Homer

Perhaps the single most admired American artist of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer used his art to document contemporary American outdoor life and to explore humankind’s spiritual as well as physical relationship to nature. Homer was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a businessman. His mother was an amateur watercolor painter who encouraged his artistic inclinations. As a youth, Homer was apprenticed to a publisher of popular lithographic prints. In 1857 he launched his career as an illustrator, moving to New York City two years later; there, he attended drawing classes at the prestigious National Academy of Design and briefly studied painting privately. During the Civil War, he went south with the Union troops as an artist-reporter for the magazine Harper’s Weekly.

After the war, Homer turned to oil painting. His first works in this medium were wartime scenes that attracted attention for their simple power and lack of sentimentality; their critical success helped gain him election to the National Academy at the age of twenty-nine. During a year spent in Paris and the French countryside, in 1866 and 1867, Homer was exposed to the influence of progressive French landscape painters, and the work he produced following his return showed a lightening of his palette and a freer application of paint. Although he would make New York City his home for over twenty years, Homer spent much of each year traveling throughout the northeast to rural, coastal, and wilderness sites to collect material for paintings and illustrations of outdoor life, depicting subjects ranging from fashionable seasonal resorts to rural childhood to African American life in the South. His paintings of these popular themes broke new ground in their naturalism, directness, and rejection of obvious narrative, and revealed his exceptional command of natural light. In 1873, during a summer spent at the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, he began to work seriously in watercolor, of which he became a master.

While many American artists were flocking to Paris in the 1880s, Homer traveled to the remote English North Sea fishing village of Cullercoats, a popular destination among English painters. During his twenty-month stay there in 1881, his work matured toward a new monumentality as he focused on the heroic women of the village and on the perilous work of the fishermen at sea. Following his return to the United States, Homer built a studio on the Maine coast at Prout’s Neck, where he lived for much of the year for the remainder of his life in close proximity to family members. The sea dominates his late work, which ranges from pure seascapes to images of fishermen and shipwreck rescues. An avid sportsman and outdoorsman, Homer also worked in the northern wilderness of New York State’s Adirondack Mountains and Quebec and traveled in winters to Florida and the Caribbean islands—all popular locales for well-to-do Americans and potential clients. His watercolors and oils, at once dispassionate and deeply emotional, document the elemental struggles of nature in their portrayals of northwoods guides, Caribbean sponge divers, and doomed animals pursued by natural and human predators.

Homer cultivated the image of a recluse and he was often disdainful of critics, journalists, and ordinary admirers. However, he was an astute businessman who wooed his serious patrons and pursued subjects of proven popularity. He was not his generation’s most financially successful artist and made no effort to kindle an international reputation. By his last decades, however, he was regarded as one of America’s foremost living painters and his works were widely acquired by American art museums. In contrast to many artists of his generation, his standing as one of America’s greatest artists remained unchallenged in the century since his death.