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Winslow Homer Watercolors: A Survey of Themes and Styles. In 1881 Winslow Homer began a series of watercolors based on life in the seaside fishing village of Cullercoats, England, where he stayed for almost two years.
This watercolor, composed vertically to accentuate the towering height of the central palm, visualizes the approach of circular storm clouds. Wind whirls around the tree, whose branches bend to the right.
A man of multiple talents, Homer excelled equally in the arts of illustration, oil painting, and watercolor. Many of his works—depictions of children at play and in school, farm girls attending to their work, hunters and their prey—have become classic images of 19th-century American life.
In this dazzling watercolor of Bahamian men either heading out to or returning from their work at sea, Homer included discarded cannons—artifacts from one of the island’s British forts—splayed across the beach.
- Overview
- Early life and work
- Adoption of watercolour and artistic development
Winslow Homer, (born February 24, 1836, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 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 spon...
Homer was born into an old New England family. When he was six, the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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 freelance illustrator. The following year he exhibited his first paintings at the National Academy of Design, New York.
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 his palette was 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.
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In 1873 Homer began to work in watercolour, which allowed him to make rapid, fresh observations of nature. In that demanding medium, he explored and resolved new artistic problems, and his oil paintings of the next few years, such as Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (1873–76), reflect the invigorating effect of watercolour.
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.
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- Jules David Prown
Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters of 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art in general.
Homer’s attention to inclement weather in this watercolor distinguishes it from the more idyllic tropical images he produced during a previous trip to the Bahamas, in 1884–85. Dark clouds threaten, while several tall palms are lashed by violent winds.
