Summary of Winslow Homer
One can imagine Winslow Homer walking the Maine shoreline captivated by the sublime power of the natural world and seeking to translate that experience onto his canvases through the bravura of his gestural brushwork. In these paintings, nature's power is both sublime and eternal, and coolly indifferent to the drama of the human condition.
The raw style of these later years was not an anomaly, but rather the distinguishing characteristic of Homer's overall career. He regularly approached subjects overlooked by professional artists of his time - rural schoolchildren, hunting scenes, or the lives of recently emancipated African-Americans - with a passion to tell a story. The uncompromising Realism of his style charted a new course for American Art, distinct from the stage-like settings of his European counterparts, while also dispensing with the idealized of the landscape or slick portraits of the upper classes which had previously dominated American painting. Instead, Homer documented the lives of average Americans in a straightforward and seemingly spontaneous style.
This look toward the defining qualities of American life and landscape not only captivated Homer, but also the later generations of American artists whom he inspired. The naturalism that marks Homer's long career, would provide a solid foundation for other icons of American painting, including Robert Henri, George Bellows, and later the modernist Marsden Hartley, each of whom made their own pilgrimage to the rocky shorelines of Maine. It was here that Homer and those who followed explored themes of mortality through images of the turbulent and seemingly eternal stretch of the northern Atlantic.
Accomplishments
- Winslow Homer's career as a painter began with his realist portrayals of the US Civil War. At first sent to the frontlines as a war correspondent, Homer documented the war through his engravings ranging from chaotic battle scenes to quiet moments of the soldier's everyday lives. These images came to visually define the war as "illustrated news" to a broad swath of the public in the Northern States. Later, Homer translated several of these drawings into a series of oil paintings that revealed the artist's insight into the life of Union soldiers.
- Throughout his long career, Homer captured the changing tides of American life and livelihood. Whereas his contemporary Thomas Eakins looked to the heroic personalities of athletes, doctors and professors, Homer sought instead to capture essential archetypes through the games of rural schoolteachers, to windswept land and seascapes, to the stout figures of fishing men and women.
- Although Homer has secured a legacy as the "quintessential American painter," two separate trips to Europe had a marked influence on the artist's approach to form and content. In Paris, he discovered the Realist canvases of Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet and the rising fascination with Japonism. Over a decade later, Homer traveled to Cullercoats, England where he was impressed by the lives of those men and women whose livelihood depended upon the sea.
- Themes of mortality repeatedly haunt Homer's oeuvre from his earliest Civil War paintings to his mid-career hunting series and, finally, his late ruminations on the sea. Often labeled as "heroic" and "masculine," Homer's deceptively simple compositions often presented precarious situations and served as poignant reminders of the fragility of life.
Biography of Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer was born to Charles Savage Homer and Henrietta Benson Homer in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle child of three sons. The family moved when young Winslow was six years of age to the nearby rural town of Cambridge. His mother was an amateur watercolorist who taught her artistic son the rudiments of her craft; their shared affinity for the arts fostered a close relationship that lasted throughout their lives. His father, on the other hand, was a largely-failed businessman and, in the words of art historian and curator Nicolai Cikovsky, an eccentric in "behavior and appearance." He was, nevertheless, supportive of his son's artistic ambitions. As Cikovsky details in the exhibition catalogue for the comprehensive 1995 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., "He also encouraged his son's 'leaning towards art' by acquiring for him, on a business trip to England, such resources for artistic self-help as 'a complete set of lithographs by Julian [sic] - representations of heads, ears, noses, eyes, faces, trees, houses, everything that a young draughtsman might fancy trying to make his hand at." Additionally, it was his father who arranged the hopeful artist with an apprenticeship to an acquaintance John H. Bufford, a prominent commercial lithographer in Boston, when Winslow reached 19 years of age.
