Homer, Winslow

Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light (Art Institute of Chicago)

Winslow Homer Watercolors

The Watercolors of Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer's watercolors rank among the greatest pictorial legacies of this country. Winslow Homer's first medium was oil painting, although to make ends meet, he did commercial illustration and chronicled the New York City social scene. Eventually, Homer withdrew from city life altogether to settle at Prout's Neck on the rocky New England coast. There he turned to watercolor, in part for financial reasons (watercolors were easier to sell), but the newly popular medium also enabled him to capture his impressions of scenery and landscapes encountered during his many travels with an immediacy and directness impossible in the more time-consuming oils. Of his more than 700 watercolors, over 140 are reproduced here, dating from the 1870s to the turn of the century and ranging from pastoral to narrative, dramatic to serene. Miles Unger's text provides insight into the artist's technical mastery of the medium and discusses the importance of Homer's watercolors within the larger body of his work. 140 color illustrations.

Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation

With close analysis of Homer's art and of the personal challenges he faced throughout his life, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation is the most comprehensive study to date of the relationship between the artist's work and the psychological stages of his life. Elizabeth Johns uses theories advanced by Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson to look at Homer's evolution as a painter and a person within the context of the continuing dynamics of his family. Her incisive and absorbing readings of the artist's work take into account the developmental stages of young, middle, and late adulthood, analyzing what Homer painted at the various turning points in his life.
With this psychosocial approach, Johns examines the wood-engraved illustrations of Homer's early career in relationship to the values of his family; his images of the Civil War in the context of his young manhood; his paintings of the social scene and young women's place in it in connection with his own potential for marriage; his images of fisherwomen at Cullercoats and fishermen at Prout's Neck as they relate to his interior vision during middle age; and his intrigue with the sea in his late works as an identification with the larger processes of the universe. With more than seventy-five black-and-white illustrations and forty color plates of arresting images by this American master, Winslow Homer takes into account all available documentation, including the rich trove of the artist's correspondence at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and his entire body of work--illustrations for wood engravings, watercolors, and oils.

Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape

During the years following the Civil War, many artists, including Homer, Church, and Moran, created images of America's scenic wonders and great landscape icons. These works, as well as decorative art objects, popular literature, photographs, and other ephemera helped to make the country's landscape a source of national pride and promoted landscape tourism.

FREDERIC CHURCH, WINSLOW HOMER, AND THOMAS MORAN: Tourism and the American Landscape is a major exhibition mounted by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum which will showcase, for the first time in more than two decades, the museum's extraordinary collection of more than 2000 paintings and drawings, which encompasses the largest grouping of Homer and Church objects in the world. Five original essays will accompany the 200 illustrations.

Winslow Homer: An American Vision

The First Major Critical Survey on the Artist in a Decade; Includes All Major Paintings.

WINSLOW HOMER: AN AMERICAN VISION, by Randall C. Griffin, is the first major critical survey on the life and work of Homer, one of America's best-loved artists, in the last decade. The book features every one of his major paintings alongside a remarkable selection of his lesser-known etchings and woodcuts. Griffin's thoroughly researched, yet readable study, not only presents a full account of Homer's life and work, but also a fresh and provocative reassessment of his place in the history of American art.

Randall Griffin, Associate Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University and an authority on Homer, begins his study of the life and works of the artist with the astute observation, "Like the poems of Walt Whitman, the pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe, the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the music of Duke Ellington, the works of Winslow have helped shape America's view of itself." Griffin argues that Homer's work exemplifies the aspiration to create specifically American subjects and a specifically American character.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was born in Boston, Massachusetts the same year that Davey Crockett died at the Alamo. He began his career a magazine illustrator and soon becoming a regular contributor to Harper's Weekly. In the early 1860's, Homer was sent by his editor to the front lines of The Civil War, where he began to work on woodcuts and lithographs of wartime encampments, some of his lesser-known pieces that are included in this monograph. In the post-war years Homer turned his attention to the American countryside and its people, and produced Snap the Whip, a painting thought by many to be his best work. This painting was embraced by critics as a nationalist masterpiece, reaffirming American ideals and values that had been lost during the war. In 1883, Homer moved to the New England fishing village of Prout's Neck, Maine and, utilizing his watercolor skills, began what was to become his best-known period of seascapes and nautical scenes.

Griffin presents an academic yet approachable study of this American classic, expanding on the criticisms and themes of Homer's work, such as post-war American values, the relationship between nature and man, the American pastoral, and the loss of manhood control. WINSLOW HOMER: AN AMERICAN VISION presents an exceptional array of Homer's gorgeous paintings, sketches and watercolors and is the most up to date monograph available on the artist. This beautiful selection of works, paired with Griffin's original research and fresh interpretation, makes this a timeless book that will compliment any library as well as satisfy the needs of scholars and general readers alike.

Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s

Winslow Homer's luminous watercolor seascapes and highly spirited portraits of children and outdoorsmen are some of the most recognizable and cherished works in the history of American art. This catalogue, published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition, examines his pictures from the 1870s, the least-studied period of this perennially popular American artist. Debunking the common myth that Homer worked in isolation, Margaret Conrads reveals him as a controversial artist who was an integral part of the dizzying New York art scene of the 1870s. Indeed, Homer was the American artist most frequently discussed by the press at this time--often with simultaneous commendation and vilification.

By viewing Homer's works of the 1870s through the lens of contemporaneous criticism, the author explains how and why the painter embodied the critics' high hopes for an art that expressed national values. She finds reflected in his vivid images an ongoing struggle to meet these expectations, even as he challenged and helped to redefine the artistic conventions governing American aesthetics.

With almost one hundred full-color plates and nearly sixty black-and-white illustrations, this handsome volume is a remarkable record of an important period not only in Winslow Homer's career but also in the fascinating art world of late-nineteenth-century America.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Kansas City, Missouri
February 18-May 6, 2001

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
June 10-September 9, 2001

High Museum of Art, Atlanta
October 6, 2001-January 6, 2002

Winslow Homer

This book discusses and reproduces more than two hundred paintings, watercolors, and drawings that span Winslow Homer`s career, focusing not only on Homer`s masterpieces in various media but also on the suites of works on the same subject that reflect the artist`s essentially modern practice of thinking and working serially and thematically.

Winslow Homer: Artist and Angler

This engaging book looks closely at Winslow Homer's avid pursuit of fly-fishing and at the inspiration the sport provided for his art.

It was fly-fishing that led the eminent painter to three of the locales with which we now associate his name: the Adirondacks in northern New York State, Florida, and Quebec. Each of these distinctive regions elicited unique and strong reactions from the painter, which took form in works that are brilliant studies of light, atmosphere, and the spirit of place.

Homer's fly-fishing paintings are an immensely varied and little-understood aspect of his art. They serve as a counterpoint to all his other work, especially in the 1880s and beyond when fly-fishing represented a regular and sustained activity for the artist. His fishing expeditions offered recreation, rejuvenation, solace, and camaraderie, which spurred his imagination. The intense visual experience of fly-fishing afforded Homer a close involvement with nature's mysterious details, revealing new worlds of color, form, and dynamism. He also found through fishing new outlets for his work, new patrons, and an audience of Victorian-era sportsmen who could comprehend his pictures. 184 illustrations, 123 in color.

Drawings of Winslow Homer (Master Draughtsman Ser.)