Winslow Homer

American painter

• Born: February 24, 1836
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: September 29, 1910
• Place of death: Prouts Neck, Maine

One of the greatest self-taught artistic figures of his time, Homer was known for his luminous watercolors and powerful oils, especially those depicting the power, moods, beauty, and menace of the sea.

Early Life

Winslow Homer’s first known work of art was a small drawing he made at the age of ten of a boy lying on the ground gazing into the distance, his head resting on his arm. Entitled Adolescence (1846), it displays no more than the proficiency that one would expect from a preteen who lacks training or apparent promise. The sketch would hardly be worth even a first glance were its creator unknown. However, the young artist no doubt received much encouragement from his mother, a decent watercolorist of flowers and birds. Henrietta Benson Homer was the mainstay of her family of three sons, keeping the home running even when her husband, Charles, sold his hardware business, invested in mining machinery, and traveled to California to prospect for gold, returning two years later, completely penniless.

Winslow was thirteen when his father left. At that time, the family was living in Cambridge, having moved there in 1842, when Winslow was ready for school. The Homer home was down the street from Harvard College, but Winslow was not to get much of a formal education; he probably did not even finish high school. He continued to draw, but when he was nineteen, his father had him apprenticed to the printmaking establishment of John Bufford, thereby launching his son’s professional career.

In the days before photographs could be printed in newspapers, there was a great demand for capable commercial artists to draw scenes and portraits for newspapers and magazines. Homer’s first artistic assignment was a portfolio of seventeen lithographs of pictures of Puritans for inclusion in a genealogical register. Other graphics followed: more drawings for books, mostly portraits or scenes from nature; title pages for sheet music, bearing such engaging titles as “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter” and “The Wheelbarrow Polka”; and even a political cartoon.

Bufford also required his apprentices to do their share of drudgery—shopkeeping, cleaning lithographers’ stones, and the like, tasks that increased Winslow’s sense of frustration and resentment. Being a regular employee of a firm such as Bufford’s held little attraction for Homer, and as soon as he turned twenty-one and his apprenticeship was officially over, he left, vowing to be his own master.

Homer rented a studio and began to work on commission; most of his early assignments were done for Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (known as Ballou’s Pictorial ), an all-purpose newsmagazine designed to appeal to those who did not like to think too much about what they were reading. Ballou’s Pictorial had an impressive circulation of 100,000. Homer did various genre pictures, portraits, street scenes, and advertisements, which all appeared in the publication as woodcuts, a medium that limited the use of curves and made it difficult for artists to draw lines fine enough to produce variations of gray. Consequently, the wood engraving turned everything into black and white and gave its figures a static, or posed, quality. Homer did not do his own woodblocks, as that task was the job of special designers.

Homer’s work for Ballou’s Pictorial attracted the attention of the editors of the newly founded Harper’s Weekly of were chosen. His first drawing for them was followed by an eight-month hiatus; then commissions became more frequent, so much so that in 1859, Homer moved to New York to be closer to his major market. This move also brought him into a more stimulating artistic environment and prompted him, for the first and last time in his life, to take formal instruction in art. He enrolled in night classes at the National Academy of Design and also took some lessons from French painter Frédéric Rondel, who taught him the basics of oil painting, how to lay down color, use brushes, and set his palette. Even so, Homer remained mostly self-taught.

Working for the illustrated weeklies was Homer’s chief source of income over the next two decades. He rapidly became one of the leading artists of Harper’s Weekly, and, when the Civil War began, Harper’s Weekly wanted to put him on staff as an artist-correspondent to draw pictures of the fighting. Homer, however, always insistent on his independence, remained free-lance. He did go to the front though, following the Union armies in George B. McClellan’s ill-fated Virginia Peninsular Campaign of 1862. Practically every week, Harper’s Weekly ran at least one of his works.

Most of Homer’s Civil War illustrations were not pictures of the fighting as such, but rather of the activities of soldiers in camp or on bivouac: in short, the military equivalent of the genre pictures that he was accustomed to doing. Even Homer’s battle drawings rarely showed blood and gore, and the enemy was hardly ever seen. He soon became recognized as one of the best war artists, but as the conflict was reaching its climax, Homer increasingly avoided doing woodblock engravings in order to develop his talent in another and ultimately more satisfying and important direction.

Life’s Work

Not until he was nearly thirty did Homer try his first painting in oils, using as a subject a sketch he had done the previous year, 1862, printed as an illustration in Harper’s Weekly. The Sharpshooter shows a Union soldier sitting in a pine tree, sighting his gun at a target somewhere off the canvas. This work was followed by Punishment for Intoxication (1863) and A Skirmish in the Wilderness (1864), which were also taken from drawings he had made while he was with the army. The paintings were done in his New York studio and are surprising for being such good first attempts.

Homer’s most famous painting of the war was Prisoners from the Front , also a studio piece, done in 1866, when the war was over. Only the uniforms and several muskets make the picture military; the composition is very basic: The six principal figures simply stand in a ragged line in the foreground in studio poses. The picture was so well received by the experts and the public that it ensured Homer’s election to full membership in the National Academy.

During that same year, Homer made his first trip to Europe, staying in Paris, where two of his paintings, including Prisoners from the Front, were to be shown at the Exposition Universelle. The paintings he did while abroad were mostly portraits of women, including two engaging oils of farm girls with pitchforks. He returned home after ten months to begin a period of great artistic creativity. In the fourteen years between his return in 1867, and 1881, when he again left for Europe, he produced more than half of the works of his entire artistic career. His search for new subjects and scenes took him all over New England, through Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Homer liked painting in the mountains: the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the White Mountains of New Hampshire; he liked painting the beaches: New England, along the New Jersey shore. As he became more practiced in oils, he also began to develop his talent in watercolor, a medium he also taught himself to use. He exhibited with the American Watercolor Society for the first time in 1874. He also continued to produce drawings for woodcuts in Harper’s Weekly and other magazines, to earn extra money, but abandoned this form altogether in 1875.

One of Homer’s favorite subjects continued to be women, whom he showed partaking in all sorts of respectable middle-class activities: picking flowers, playing croquet, tossing hoops. Even if the task was gathering eggs or taking care of sick chickens, the subjects hardly seemed engaged in real physical labor. Homer also liked to depict the pleasures of youth: children playing games, wading, dreaming, sitting on fences, gathering clams. For these bucolically pretty pictures, he filled his palette with bright warm colors, exactly the sort of hues that would appeal to his bourgeois clients. However, he also did paintings that were not so commercially motivated, and these must be judged among the best of the period. These come from his stay in Virginia, where he had an opportunity to observe the rural poverty of African Americans. He revealed these people with a compassion and sensitivity rare for a time when African Americans were seen as objects of derision.

As Homer became more involved in his art, he seemed to relate less successfully to other people and became more attached to his solitude. In 1881, he again left the United States for Europe, but this time he did not go to a large urban center, but rather to Cullercoats, a drab fishing village on the eastern coast of England, near Tynemouth. There, surrounded by working-class people, he found the isolation he wanted, his loneliness reinforced by watching the dark, changing moods of the North Sea and studying its effect on those who relied on it for their livelihood. He painted storms and shipwrecks and fisherwomen watching the dark waters for the return of their men. It was in England that he did the visual research, the artistic counterpart of working in an archive, for canvases that he would complete when he returned home. His famous The Herring Net (1885) almost certainly had its origins in his experiences there.

Homer returned to New York in late 1882, but he could never readjust to the urban life he once knew. In England, he had discovered the kind of simplicity he was seeking in life and wanted to portray in his work. Therefore, in 1883, he decided to settle on the craggy coast of Maine, on a rough promontory jutting southward into Saco Bay, known as Prouts Neck, which had been purchased by his father. There Homer built a studio; there he would remain for the remainder of his life, leaving only occasionally on excursions to Canada, Florida, and Bermuda. He continued the course he had charted for himself while in England, painting his greatest masterpieces. In 1909, he painted his last picture, Driftwood , which is also one of his best. After he finished, he smeared his palette and hung it on the wall, never to take it down again. The following year, he died. He was seventy-four.

Significance

Winslow Homer was one of the greatest self-taught artistic figures of the nineteenth century. His consuming passion for his craft, his intense struggle to succeed, perhaps an overcompensation for his lack of formal training, constantly nurtured his compulsion to improve, and the older he became, the better his technique became. He had many opportunities to see the works of famous predecessors, but he avoided doing so, reluctant to damage his own instincts and compromise his powers of observation and sense of style.

Homer visited museums in Paris and London, but more out of a sense of obligation than out of a search for inspiration. If he was impressed by the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, it was because they offered him confirmation and reinforcement, not contrast. Homer also made little contact with other living artists, neither those who painted in the standard academic vein, nor those more revolutionary, such as the Impressionists and their successors. Homer’s art remained grounded in his own narrow, artistic universe. He became wedded to a basic classical compositional framework established during his career as an illustrator.

Had Homer died at fifty, he would have left many pleasing canvases and watercolors—his Civil War woodcuts might be regarded as interesting period pieces, but not the stuff of greatness. A notable exception was the The Carnival (1877), one of his pictures of the black Virginians. Homer arranged his figures in his usual manner, marching them across the foreground in rough formation, but rarely had he used oil color more dramatically and skillfully. Also remarkable was his depiction of character. In showing the determination with which these people celebrated their holiday, he revealed their sense of hopelessness; in painting a scowl on the face of a barefoot girl, he projected their life of penury. To this he added a touch of irony: The two youngest children are carrying tiny American flags.

Homer’s true greatness lay ahead, revealed in the last twenty years of his life, a time when he became a virtual recluse. If an artist’s character is truly revealed in his art, then Homer presents something of a problem. There is a sense of pessimism and terror in many of his seascape oils, but his watercolors are full of joie de vivre and hope. These are boldly presented, not picky in color or detail, and convey a sprightly immediacy that is alien to many of his morose canvases.

Homer’s reputation, however, will always be based on his great marine paintings. Compositionally, they are hardly revolutionary. There is a certain theatricality about the manner in which he arranges his subjects, as if he were a director constantly blocking his scenes in stage center or just back of the footlights. Although he liked to work outdoors, in many of these oils it almost seems as if the turbulent waters had come into his studio to pose. The waves crashing against the rocks often have the same sculptural quality as the rocks themselves. Homer depicts movement not so much by composition, for example in the frenetic way of a work by Eugène Delacroix, but in the fluidity of his brush strokes and in his use of color.

In the flesh tones of the bearded sailor in The Lookout—All’s Well (1896), Homer builds up his colors in thin layers, juxtaposing warm with cool, until one can almost see underneath the man’s saltwater-toughened skin. The sun-and-surf-punished decking of the small sailboat in The Gulf Stream (1899) and the water surrounding the hapless craft are painted with the skill of Claude Monet at his best. Homer also has a fine sense of drama and understanding of theme. For example, in The Wreck (1896), Homer concentrated on a rescue operation rather than the disaster itself. In the foreground, in full-length black rubber coat, stands a gaunt, spectral walrus-mustached veteran, his right hand raised as a signal for help or in warning to onlookers to keep away. The man has obviously been through such tragedies many times before.

In depicting such moments, Homer makes one forget the individual elements of his art, just as hearing a great symphony makes one forget the individual notes. However, only by mastering the fundamentals was Homer, like all great artists, able to transcend his medium and convey the true immensity of his talent.

Bibliography

Beam, Philip C. Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. Beam concentrates on the last and greatest period of the artist’s life. He seeks to enhance understanding of Homer’s work by evaluating the internal evidence in his pictures and by understanding his relation to other American and European art of his time.

Downes, William Howe. Life and Works of Winslow Homer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. This biography, published a year after Homer’s death, was the first attempt to create a chronology of the subject’s life. The author was awed by his responsibility, for he seems to have included every scrap of information he could find. However, Homer himself was not too cooperative, once telling Downes that no part of his life was of much concern to the public: “Therefore I must decline to give you any particulars in regard to it.”

Flexner, James Thomas. The World of Winslow Homer, 1936-1910. New York: Time, 1966. This study, from the Time-Life Library of Art series, gives a fine presentation of Homer in the context of the development of American art. Especially helpful are such special sections as Homer as a watercolorist and the description of two other contemporary giants, Thomas Eakins and Albert Ryder.

Goodrich, Lloyd. Winslow Homer. New York: Macmillan, 1944. An artistic biography rather than an account of Homer’s personal life. The author treats his subject with understanding and insight, the product of careful and meticulous research. Includes a twenty-page reminiscence by one of Homer’s friends, John Beatty.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Winslow Homer. New York: Macmillan, 1973. The catalog to accompany the Winslow Homer exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most of the book features reproductions of the works on display; these are put in context by an intelligent essay on Homer’s life and the important stages in his artistic development.

Griffin, Randall C. Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz: The Search for American Identity in the Gilded Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Examines how artists and critics sought to create a new identity for the United States that would match the Gilded Age’s taste for opulence. Focuses on Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Anshutz, describing how their work led to the development of modern American art.

Hannaway, Patti. Winslow Homer in the Tropics. Richmond, Va.: Westover, 1973. The restricted scope of this book is part of a recent development to concentrate on one aspect of the artist’s life, in this case his output of watercolors done while he was in Florida and in the Bahamas. The book is a catalog of the principal products of those visits. The illustrations are particularly good and are accompanied by a short background piece and artistic commentary.

Hendricks, Gordon. The Life and Work of Winslow Homer. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. This well-researched, sumptuously produced volume includes many excellent reproductions, supplemented by intelligent commentary and an exhaustive listing of the artist’s works in public collections in the United States.

Hoopes, Donelson E. Winslow Homer Watercolors. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1969. Representative samples of Homer’s work from 1878 to 1904. Intelligent analysis of Homer’s color technique and sense of composition.

Johns, Elizabeth. Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Analyzes Homer’s work and artistic development from the perspective of development psychology, focusing on one hundred images that represent turning points in his life. Discusses Homer’s illustrations, oil paintings, and watercolors.

Junker, Patricia A., et al. Winslow Homer, Artist and Angler. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Catalog accompanying an exhibit of Homer’s fishing paintings displayed in San Francisco and Fort Worth, Texas. The book’s essays discuss Homer’s love of fly-fishing, his fishing experiences, and the place of fish and fishing in his artwork. Includes 184 illustrations.