Homer, Winslow

born Feb. 24, 1836, Boston, Mass., U.S.

died Sept. 29, 1910, Prouts Neck, Maine

U.S. painter.

He served an apprenticeship with a Boston lithographer, then became a freelance illustrator in New York City. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1860 and was elected a member in 1865. During a stay in France in 1866, he was attracted to French naturalism and Japanese prints, but they had little effect on his generally bright and happy work. He became a master of watercolour and his ability as an oil painter matured; he focused increasingly on solitary, withdrawn figures. He spent 1881–82 in the English village of Tynemouth, on the North Sea, where the coastal atmosphere, the sea, and the stoic people are the subjects of some of his most powerful images. In 1883 he moved permanently to Prouts Neck, and his dominant theme became the sea and the endless struggle against an uncaring nature. In his later years he continued to paint vigorously and in near-total isolation. Though he was recognized in his lifetime as a leading U.S. painter, appreciation of his enormous achievement came only after his death.

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▪ American artist

born Feb. 24, 1836, Boston, Mass., U.S.

died Sept. 29, 1910, Prouts Neck, Maine

 American painter whose works, particularly those on marine subjects, are among the most powerful and expressive of late 19th-century American art. His mastery of sketching and watercolour lends to his oil paintings the invigorating spontaneity of direct observation from nature (e.g., in “The Gulf Stream,” 1899). His subjects, often deceptively simple on the surface, dealt in their most serious moments with the theme of man's efforts to establish his humanness in the face of an indifferent universe.

      Homer was born into an old New England family. When he was six, the family moved to Cambridge, then a rural village, where he enjoyed a happy country childhood. His artistic inclinations were encouraged by his mother, an amateur painter. When he was 19, he was apprenticed to the lithographic firm of John Bufford in Boston. At first, most of his work involved copying the designs of other artists, but within a few years he was submitting his own drawings for publication in such periodicals as Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly. In 1859 Homer moved from Boston to New York City to begin a career as a free-lance illustrator. The following year he exhibited his first paintings at the National Academy of Design.

      With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Homer made drawings at the front for Harper's, but unlike most artist-correspondents he dealt more often with views of everyday camp life than with scenes of battle. As the war dragged on, he concentrated increasingly on painting. In 1865 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Admirably capturing the dominant national mood of reconciliation, his “Prisoners from the Front” (1866) was warmly received when exhibited at the academy shortly after the war ended.

      Although Homer's studio was in New York City, the city was rarely his theme. During the warm months he traveled to Pennsylvania, the Hudson River valley, and New England, camping, hunting, fishing, and sketching. In 1866 he went to France for about a year. Although influenced by French naturalism, Japanese prints, and contemporary fashion illustration, his work after his return to America did not change markedly, except that the pictures were generally somewhat brighter. Such early pictures as “Long Branch, New Jersey” (1869) and “Snap the Whip” (1872) depict happy scenes, the former of fashionable ladies promenading along the seashore and the latter of children frolicking in a meadow after school. In a few early pictures a disquieting note of human isolation is struck, premonitory of Homer's later, more powerful work.

      In 1873 Homer began to work in watercolour, which allowed him to make rapid, fresh observations of nature. In this demanding medium he explored and resolved new artistic problems, and paintings of the next few years, such as “Breezing Up,” or “A Fair Wind” (1876), reflect the invigorating effect of the watercolours.

      Homer matured slowly as an artist, but his development was constant. With the passage of years his oil paintings became larger, his figures more solitary, his concern for naturalistic detail greater. He painted many women, increasingly as single figures, intimate, withdrawn, feminine. From the late 1870s Homer began to devote his summers exclusively to direct painting from nature in watercolour. Greater concern for atmospheric effects and reflected light added complexity to the images but at the same time enabled him to achieve greater pictorial unity.

      Although Homer received some recognition during his early years, he had not had any real success by midcareer. By 1880 he began to show signs of increasing antisociality, deliberately shunning the company of other people. In 1881 he unexpectedly went to England, where he spent about two years sketching and painting in Tynemouth, a remote fishing port on the North Sea. Here, at the age of 45, his period of greatest artistic growth began. He was intrigued by the life of the hardy fisherfolk of Tynemouth, who struggled against the sea to earn their livelihood, but he did not paint that struggle directly. He depicted instead the robust and courageous women of Tynemouth, who mended the nets, kept house, and waited for their men to return from the sea. The English coastal atmosphere posed a new and difficult artistic challenge, but Homer mastered the diffused light, limited in colour but infinitely varied in tone, in a series of subtle watercolours.

      After Homer's return to America in 1883, the sea became the dominant theme in his work. He moved to Prouts Neck, a fishing village on the bleak, desolate coast of Maine. He traveled extensively but always returned to his Prouts Neck studio to convert his sketches into major paintings. Solitude became for Homer not simply a preference but an absolute necessity, as he turned his mind and his art to subjects dealing with man's fate in confronting the elemental forces of nature.

      In the summer of 1883 Homer saw a demonstration in Atlantic City of the use of a breeches buoy for rescue from the sea. The following year he painted his large, impressive, and immediately popular painting “The Life Line” (1884), one of several he did at this time on the rescue theme, depicting the dramatic transfer of an unconscious female from a wrecked ship to shore.

      During the next few years, Homer's interest shifted from the edge of the sea to the sea itself. Perhaps inspired by a putative trip to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Can., with a fishing fleet, he painted heroic men in the act of pitting their strength, intelligence, and experience against the mighty sea. In the most impressive of these works, “Fog Warning” (1885), night is falling, fog is rolling in, and a lone fisherman in a dory calculates the distance and the time remaining for him to get back to his home ship in safety. Although the monumental narrative paintings Homer produced in his studio in the mid-1880s lack the freshness of his earlier works, Homer simultaneously painted innumerable brilliantly coloured watercolours during his travels north to Canada and south to the Caribbean.

      While Homer's fishermen and their women are heroic in their confrontations with the physical world, the artist occasionally took a more jaundiced view of his fellowman. In “Huntsman and Dogs” of 1891, set in a cheerless autumnal landscape, a sullen-faced young hunter, pausing on a hillside leveled by timbering and blackened by fire, epitomizes man as a despoiler of nature, killing for trophies rather than food.

      Homer abandoned the human subject entirely in “The Fox Hunt” of 1893. A fox ventures forth to forage for berries on the snow-covered land, and a sinister line of starved black crows converges to attack him. The ensuing life-and-death struggle will be over quickly, but the pulse of nature that drives the winter ocean against the cliffs in the distance will go on forever. “Northeaster” (1895) distills this theme, and only the viewer witnesses the endless struggle between the irresistible sea and the immovable rocky shore. In “Northeaster,” Homer successfully wedded the freshness of his watercolours to the power of his oils to achieve an impressive pictorial effect that, as in many of his later works, transcends the subject matter.

      “The Gulf Stream” (1899) stands at the apex of Homer's career. A black man lies inert on the deck of a small sailboat. A hurricane has shredded the sails, snapped off the mast, and snatched away the rudder. Unlike the boys in “Breezing Up” or the fisherman in “Fog Warning,” this man is powerless to control his vessel. He is at the mercy of the elements. Sharks circle the boat, a waterspout hovers in the distance, and a boat on the distant horizon passes by unseeing and unseen. As in Stephen Crane's comparable short story, The Open Boat, nature is seen as not caring whether a man lives or dies.

      Homer, ever more crusty and isolated in his old age, continued to paint vigorously and adventurously through the first decade of the 20th century. Similar in subject matter to his earlier work, although with more emphasis on pure seascape, his late paintings, in their unconventional composition and brilliant colour, reflect increasing concern with the abstract and expressive possibilities of art. Homer died in his Prouts Neck studio in 1910. Although by the 1890s he had become generally recognized as one of the leading American painters, and his work brought top prices, his passing was but briefly noted, and appreciation of his artistic achievement came only in the years following his death.

Jules David Prown

Additional Reading

Biographical and critical works include Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (1944), perhaps the most comprehensive and important study of Homer; Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Work of Winslow Homer (1979), extensively illustrated; James Thomas Flexner, The World of Winslow Homer, 1836–1910, rev. ed. (1980), a view of the artistic context within which Homer worked; Nikolai Cikovsky, Jr., Winslow Homer (1990); David Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Illustrated Book (1992); and several exhibition catalogs: Helen A. Cooper, Winslow Homer Watercolors (1986); Philip C. Beam et al., Winslow Homer in the 1890s: Prout's Neck Observed (1990); and Bruce Robertson, Reckoning with Winslow Homer: His Late Paintings and Their Influence (1990).

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