Homer, Winslow

Homer, Winslow (1836–1910), oil and watercolor painter and illustrator.Although Winslow Homer began his career by drawing scenes of rural New England life for popular magazines, critics acclaimed his style for precisely its lack of sentimental, moralizing narrative. Born in Boston, where he trained as a graphic artist, he moved to New York in 1859 and supported himself as a freelance illustrator. Hired by Harper's Weekly to cover the Civil War, he avoided topicality or sentimentality. Instead, his illustrations humanized the war by depicting incidents of daily life at the front. His Prisoners from the Front, depicting the surrender of a range of southern character “types” to an honorable Union officer, exhibited in New York in 1866, secured his reputation as a serious painter whose understated realism connoted honesty. Both during and after the war, Homer painted African Americans as central subjects, though his representation shifted from the self‐reliant independence of Weaning the Calf (1875) to the unrelieved grimness of The Gulf Stream (1899). Two visits to Europe influenced his style and themes: an 1866 trip to the Universal Exposition in France, where he encountered Japanese woodblock prints and Barbizon‐school landscapes, and an 1881 stay at an English fishing village near Tynemouth. Between these trips Homer worked in New York, painting sun‐lit images of women at fashionable resorts such as the beach at Long Branch, New Jersey (1869), or, in the 1870s, rural boys at play, as in Snap the Whip (1872). After 1883, when Homer settled in Prout's Neck, Maine, his subjects changed to muscular, monumental fishermen and ‐women struggling with the sea for survival, as in The Life Line (1884). These paintings, like his less dramatic Adirondack hunting scenes, presented a masculine, vigorous outdoor world. Vacations in Quebec, Florida, Bermuda, and the Bahamas resulted in watercolors of men and the sea, influential for their fluid brushwork and saturated color. His final paintings depict the confrontation between elemental forces of nature, largely without human involvement, as in Fox Hunt (1893).
See also Gilded Age; Magazines; Painting: To 1945.

Bibliography

Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art , Winslow Homer: A Symposium, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 26, 1990.
Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., and Franklin Kelly, et al. , Winslow Homer, 1995.

Wendy J. Katz