Winslow Homer

The paintings of Winslow Homer (1836–1910) capture the agonies and triumphs of nineteenth-century Americans and the power of land and sea. Although some of his most famous works describe extraordinary moments of human struggle, his subjects are more typically individuals engaged in the activities of daily life. Homer’s work was scrutinized by period critics and continues to captivate contemporary scholars who have used his life and work to examine psychoanalysis, gender, and cultural studies. Despite the various interpretations of his work, all agree that Homer’s realist style is quintessentially American and displays a technical proficiency in printmaking, oil, and watercolor.

Homer was born in Boston and raised in the semi-rural town of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the second of three sons in a middle class family, and spent his youth fishing and playing outdoors, activities that he would pursue throughout his life. His mother saw that the boys were well educated, and instilled in them a strong work ethic. Homer received no formal training in art until his apprenticeship with J.H. Bufford, a Boston lithographer, in 1855. Under Bufford, Homer learned basic drawing and printmaking skills as well as the business of art making. At times reclusive, Homer was consistently reticent to reveal details about his private life or his art. [1]

During the nineteenth century, illustrated weekly magazines were increasingly popular with the American public, facilitated by more sophisticated printmaking techniques and inexpensive pulp paper. After two years with Bufford, Homer became an illustrator for Ballou’s Pictorial in Boston and in 1859 he moved to New York and did free-lance work for Harper’s Weekly while he studied drawing at the Life School of the National Academy of Design and the fundamentals of painting with Frederick Rondel. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Harper’s Weekly appointed him artist-correspondent and assigned him to the Army of the Potomac. He spent more than a year at this post, suffering deprivation and boredom alongside Union soldiers.

The Civil War inspired Homer’s earliest oil paintings; he used soldiers for his subjects such as the menacing gunman in The Sharpshooter and the Confederate soldiers in Prisoners at the Front. Following the war and a trip to Paris in 1866–1867, Homer’s imagery shifted to rural genre scenes, often depictions of children at play, vacationers, and people performing simple tasks. Many scholars believe this signaled a desire to recapture the innocence of childhood after the devastation of the war. No matter the subject, Homer emphasized narratives and maintained a graphic quality, a testament to his origins as an illustrator. His early oil paintings received mixed reviews from the critics of the National Academy, where he was nevertheless accepted a full academician in 1866. His diploma painting, Croquet Player, bears the following inscription, “Winslow Homer would like to have the privilege of painting a better picture,” an indication of his lack of confidence in his work. [2]

By the mid-1870s, Homer was doing less illustration and began to work in watercolor, which was ideally suited to his temperament and his lifestyle. It was his medium of choice as he traveled to England, Florida, and Bermuda, and also on his regular sojourns to the Adirondacks for fishing and hunting. The tonal qualities that he achieved in these images reveal his remarkable talent as a painter, and through lively wet brushwork he was able to create fresh and spontaneous images. As Homer forged a niche for his watercolors, critics increasingly embraced his skill, and he, along with John Singer Sargent, is credited with elevating the stature of watercolor as a viable painting technique. The writer Henry James commented, “he naturally sees everything at one with its envelope of light and air.” [3]

On Homer’s first trip to Europe in 1866–1867, he went to Paris to visit the Louvre; there he was exposed to Japanese prints and the modernist work of Edouard Manet. On his second trip abroad, 1881–1882, Homer’s experience was more solitary and less art-oriented. After a visit to London, he traveled up the east coast of England, studying life in small fishing towns. More and more, he painted themes of isolation, which mirrored his increasingly reclusive life, and he turned toward painting masterful landscapes. In 1882, at the age of forty-seven, Homer made a break from New York and settled in the small peninsular town of Prout’s Neck on the Maine coast, an area which later would evolve into a summer resort. A lifelong bachelor, Homer, for the next twenty-seven years, lived a quiet and solitary life close to the raging sea that inspired some of his most compelling landscapes.

Notes:

[1] Gloria-Gilda Delak, Kennedy Galleries' Profiles of American Artists (New York: Kennedy Galleries), 1984, and Philip C. Beam, “Winslow Homer Before 1890,” in Winslow Homer Observed, ed. Patricia Junker (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1990), 15–24.

[2] Cited in “A Chronology of Homer’s Early Career, 1859–1866,” in Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, ed. Marc Simpson (San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1988), 24.

[3] James, quoted in Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 73.