Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer (1836-1910), a pioneer in naturalistic painting of the American scene, was the most versatile American artist of his period, with the widest range of subjects, styles, and mediums.

Of long New England ancestry, Winslow Homer was born in Boston on Feb. 24, 1836. Growing up in nearby Cambridge, he had an active outdoor boyhood that gave him a lifelong love of the country. From youth he was independent, and terse in speech, with a dry Yankee humor. He was almost entirely self-taught. About the age of 19 he was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer, but as soon as he became 21 he launched himself as an illustrator, especially for Harper's Weekly in New York.

Moving to New York in 1859, Homer free-lanced for Harper's, studied briefly at the National Academy of Design, and took a few private lessons in painting. During the Civil War he went to the Virginia front several times for Harper's. His illustrations of the 1860s and 1870s, notable for their realism, strong draftsmanship, and fine design, rank among the best graphic art of their time in America.

But an illustrator's career did not satisfy Homer. In 1862 he produced his first adult paintings. After the war he turned to the subject matter he always preferred, contemporary country life: summer resorts with their fashionable, comely young women; the simpler life of the farm; and the joys of childhood in the country. These early works, combining utter fidelity to the native scene with reserved idyllic poetry, form the most authentic and delightful pictorial record of rural America in the 1860s and 1870s.

From the first, Homer's work was based on direct observation of nature. Disregarding traditional styles, he put down his firsthand visual sensations of outdoor light and color. This fresh vision was combined with an instinctive feeling for decorative values and the sensuous qualities of color, line, and pigment. In these respects his work paralleled early French impressionism, but without any possible influence. Not until he was 30 did he go abroad, in late 1866, for 10 months in France, not studying but painting on his own. This experience had relatively little influence on his art.

In 1873 Homer took up a new medium, watercolor, which proved perfectly suited to his basically graphic style and which soon became as important to him as oil. Probably because of the modest success of his watercolors, after 1875 he gave up illustrating, except occasionally.

A decisive change in Homer's career came in 1881 and 1882, when he spent two seasons in England, near Tynemouth, a fishing port on the stormy North Sea. Working almost entirely in watercolor, he first began to picture the sea and the hardy men and women who made their living on it. These watercolors showed a new seriousness and depth of feeling and a great technical advance in atmospheric quality, deeper color, and rounder modeling.

In 1883 Homer left New York for good and settled in a lonely spot on the Maine coast, Prout's Neck. On the rocky shore he built a studio which was his home for the rest of his life. He lived alone, doing his own cooking and housework; he sometimes remained through the hard Maine winters. Always reticent about personal matters, Homer never divulged his reasons for this withdrawal from civilization. There had been an unhappy love affair some years before, and he had never married. But regardless of this, he had found the subjects that meant most to him. There was no element of defeat in his withdrawal; his letters to his family prove that his way of living was genuinely satisfying. "The life that I have chosen, " he once wrote, "gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The Sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks."

From this time Homer's art changed fundamentally. His themes now were the sea, the forest, the mountains, and the lives of sailors, fishermen, and hunters. His style became sure, powerful, and skilled, and within a few years he had attained full maturity. The first fruits of this growth were a series of marine paintings, including Eight Bells and The Fog Warning, which are pictorial classics of the sea.

The success of his sea paintings led Homer to embark on a new medium, etching. Seven of the eight plates he etched between 1884 and 1889 were based on these paintings and his English watercolors, but with changes that make them among the best designed of any of his works, and among the strongest 19th-century American prints. However, they failed to sell, and he abandoned etching after 1889.

As the years passed at Prout's Neck, Homer's dominant theme became the sea itself. It was the ocean at its stormiest that he loved. His marines take us right into the battlefront between sea and shore, making us feel the weight and movement of the wave, the solidity of the rock, the impact of their collision. In other moods they show us the radiance of dawn or sunset over the water. These marines are supreme expressions of the power, danger, and beauty of the sea.

Homer seldom discussed esthetic matters, and his few recorded statements express a straight naturalistic viewpoint. Although he once said; "When I have selected the thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears, " his work itself gives ample evidence to the contrary. He simplified severely, concentrating on the large forms and movements. In his mature works, naturalism and decorative values achieved a synthesis; the balance of masses, the strong linear rhythms, and the robust earthy color harmonies were evidently the product of well-considered design.

Homer's purest artistic achievements, aside from his mature oils, were his later watercolors. Almost every year he and his elder brother Charles, both outdoor men, made camping visits to the northern woods—the Adirondacks and Quebec. Here Homer painted scores of watercolors which captured the unspoiled beauty of the wilderness with a vividness and force new in American painting. Their command of line and color and their unerring rightness of design present interesting parallels with the decorative values of Oriental art.

From the late 1890s Homer spent part of most winters in the Bahamas, Florida, or Bermuda. The West Indies revealed to him a new world of light and color. He romanticized the lives of blacks in the Bahamas in a series of superb watercolors that attained the highest brilliancy in all his work. These late watercolors, whether southern or northern, were the purest expressions of his visual delight in the external world. They contain the essence of his genius—the direct impact of nature on the artist's eye, recorded in all its purity by the hand of a master.

In old age Homer was generally considered the foremost painter living in America, and he received many honors. All his important oils were sold during his lifetime. None of this made any difference in the quantity or quality of his works or in his solitary way of living. He died at Prout's Neck on Sept. 29, 1910.

Homer was the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor life in 19th-century America. In his energy, his wide range, the pristine freshness of his vision, and his simple sensuous vitality, he expressed certain aspects of the American spirit as no preceding artist had.

Further Reading

Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (1944), based on Homer's letters, previously unpublished material, and a record of his works, is the most complete biography and critique. Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, Winslow Homer: American Artist (1961), presents interesting but questionable theories about Homer's relation to French and Japanese art. Philip C. Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout's Neck (1966), includes new, firsthand information on his life in Maine. James Thomas Flexner, The World of Winslow Homer (1966), places him in the context of American art of his period. Special aspects of his art are covered in Lloyd Goodrich, The Graphic Art of Winslow Homer (1968) and Winslow Homer's America (1969), and in Donelson F. Hoopes, Winslow Homer Watercolors (1969).

Additional Sources

Cikovsky, Nicolai, Winslow Homer, New York: Abrams, 1990.

Downes, William Howe, The life and works of Winslow Homer, New York, B. Franklin 1974; New York: Dover Publications, 1989.

Hendricks, Gordon, The life and work of Winslow Homer, New York: H. N. Abrams, 1979. □

Homer, Winslow (1836−1910)

Winslow Homer was an American painter and engraver. After beginning his career as a freelance illustrator for magazines like Harper's Weekly, he turned to the subject of children in one-room schoolhouses, on farms, and at the seashore. By the 1880s he moved away from this theme of childhood, and began to paint the dramatic seascapes of Maine and the hunting and fishing scenes from the Adirondacks for which he is well-known.

Homer's pictures of schoolchildren depict both the interior and exterior of the rural red one-room schoolhouse. Homer publicly exhibited or published eight paintings and two engravings of this subject between 1871 and 1874. The most well-known of these is a picture (of which there are two versions) of a group of boys playing the game of snap-the-whip. Others depict the young female teacher or children engaged in their lessons. The female teacher was a sign of the modernity of the pictures (the prevalence of female teachers was brought about by the Civil War), while the rural one-room schoolhouse was a nostalgic image for urban viewers. Importantly, the public school was seen as a uniquely American institution, and therefore the pictures were also seen as particularly national. Two of them represented the United States at the 1878 Paris Exposition.

During these years Homer also painted many farm scenes, featuring both children and adults. He depicted boys relaxing and engaged in summer activities (including crossing a pasture to go fishing, sleeping on the grass, eating watermelon, and fishing from a log). Many of these pastoral images also include young girls, and often a flirtatious exchange between the two. Henry James described these figures as "little barefoot urchins and little girls in calico sun-bonnets." Towards the end of the decade Homer painted a group of works which depicted young girls on the farm, or "shepherdesses," as contemporary critics called them.

Some of Homer's paintings were watercolors, including a large group from his 1873 summer visit to Gloucester, Massachusetts. These pictures depict children, especially boys, along the seashore: in the water on boats (including Breezing Up ), on the beach, digging for clams, and looking out to sea. In Gloucester, where many fishermen were lost at sea in the 1870s, this last theme (as in pictures like Waiting for Dad ) is especially poignant.

Homer's pictures are consistent with the growing interest in childhood in the late nineteenth century. Although they often depicted a sense of an earlier world, they were very different from the sentimentalized genre pictures of the period. As such, they received a mixed reception from contemporary critics. While some praised the subjects as particularly national and representative of the unique way of American life, others lambasted the subjects as coarse; while some saw his style as innovative and modern, others saw it as unfinished and crude. The mixed responses are typical of the changing standards of the art world in the 1870s; during the twentieth century some of these pictures of children were among Homer's best-known works.

See also: Images of Childhood.

bibliography

Carren, Rachel Ann. 1990. "From Reality to Symbol: Images of Children in the Art of Winslow Homer." Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, College Park.

Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr., and Frank Kelly. 1995. Winslow Homer. Washington: National Gallery of Art.

Conrads, Margaret C. 2001. Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Melissa Geisler Trafton

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

Homer, Winslow (1836–1910) US painter and illustrator. He won international acclaim for his coverage of the American Civil War in Harper's Weekly and particular recognition as a painter with Prisoners from the Front (1866). He is best known for haunting oil and watercolour paintings, such as The Country School (1871) and Northeaster (1895).