Portal:Winslow Homer
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Introduction
Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art.
Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium. He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.
Selected general articles
Snap the Whip is a 1872 oil painting by Winslow Homer. It depicts a group of children playing a game in a field in front of an old red schoolhouse. With more of America's population moving to cities, this portrait depicts the simplicity of rural agrarian life that Americans began to leave behind in the post-Civil war era.
Homer spent several summers in New York's Hudson Valley, and is said to have been inspired to paint this scene by local boys playing at the Hurley schoolhouse. Read more...
Dressing for the Carnival is an 1877 painting by the American painter, printmaker and illustrator Winslow Homer.
Homer painted African Americans, completely avoiding the stereotypes with which their collective image had been flooded during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. The 1870s and 1880s produced innumerable images of African Americans at carnival time, mindless, jolly, condescending.
But Homer's Dressing for the Carnival is unlike all of them: a deeply nuanced and, in the end, tragic scene of preparation for festivity. A group of people is preparing for the African-American festival known in the South as Jonkonnu and in the North as Pinkster. It entailed the costuming of a Harlequin-like figure or Lord of Misrule, and this Homer depicts: a man caparisoned in bright, tatterdemalion clothes, yellow, red, and blue, with a liberty cap on his head. Two women are sewing them on him. The one on the right extends her arm, pulling the long thread right through, in a gesture of compelling and somber gravity; she is a classical Fate, seen below the Mason-Dixon line. Next to her, but apart from her, gazing at the vesting ceremony with wonder, are some children, one of whom holds a Stars and Stripes (for by Reconstruction, the rituals of the Fourth of July had been overlaid on those of Jonkonnu). Homer makes us sense how far the hopes of emancipation still are from the realities of black life in the South. Read more...
Children Under a Palm (or sometimes Children Under a Palm Tree) is a water colour painting by Winslow Homer. It was featured in the second episode of the BBC TV series Fake or Fortune? Read more...
Right and Left is a 1909 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a pair of common goldeneye ducks at the moment they are hit by a hunter's shotgun blast as they attempt to take flight. Completed less than two years before his death, it was Homer's last great painting, and has been the subject of a variety of interpretations regarding its origin, composition and meaning. As with his other late masterworks, it represents a return to the sporting and hunting subjects of Homer's earlier years, and was to be his final engagement with the theme. Its design recalls that of Japanese art, and the composition resembles that of a colored engraving by John James Audubon. Read more...
The Fog Warning is one of several paintings on marine subjects by the late-19th-century American painter Winslow Homer (1836–1910). Together with The Herring Net and Breezing Up, painted the same year and also depicting the hard lives of fishermen in Maine, it is considered among his best works on such topics. Read more...- Fishing Boats, Key West is a 1903 watercolor and graphite drawing by Winslow Homer. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read more...
Northeaster is one of several paintings on marine subjects by the late-19th-century American painter Winslow Homer. Like The Fog Warning and Breezing Up, he created it during his time in Maine. It is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Viewers are presented a struggle of elements between the sea and the rocky shore. Winslow Homer excelled in painting landscape paintings that depicted seascapes and mountain scenery. Read more...
The Bright Side, 1865, by Winslow Homer
The Bright Side is an oil painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. Painted in 1865, the concluding year of the American Civil War, the work depicts four African American Union Army teamsters sitting on the sunny side of a Sibley tent. The painting is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco-(De Young)
Its dimensions are 33.7 cm (13.27 in.) x 44.5 cm (17.52 in.) Read more...
Winslow Homer. The Fox Hunt, 1893. Oil on canvas, 96.5 × 174 cm (38 × 68½ in). Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
The Fox Hunt is an 1893 oil on canvas painting by Winslow Homer. It depicts a fox running in deep snow, menaced by hungry crows. His largest single work, it has been described as "Homer's greatest Darwinian painting, arguably his greatest painting of any kind."
The Fox Hunt was painted in Homer's studio at Prouts Neck, Maine during the winter of 1893. The painting depicts a fox foraging for food, who is in turn being hunted by crows driven to predation by hunger. At left several sprigs of red berries breach the snow, and in the distance may be seen the coastline and ocean beneath a deep blue sky. Read more...
In Front of Yorktown, 1862-1863 by Winslow Homer
In Front of Yorktown, 1862-1863 is an oil painting by Winslow Homer of men from McClellan's Army of the Potomac, before the Siege of Yorktown.
It is also known as Camp Near Yorktown, A Camp Scene, and possibly as On the Picket Line. Read more...
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) is an oil painting by American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a catboat called the Gloucester chopping through that city's harbor under "a fair wind" (Homer's original title). Inside the boat are a man, three boys, and their catch.
Homer began the canvas in New York in 1873, after he had visited Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he first worked in watercolor. He used the sketches made there, of which the most closely related is Sailing the Catboat (1873), for the oil painting, which he worked on over three years. Infrared reflectography has revealed the many changes he made to the composition during this time, including the removal of a fourth boy near the mast and a second schooner in the distance. At one point the adult held both the sheet and the tiller, a position initially adapted from an oil study of 1874 titled The Flirt. The painting's message is positive; despite the choppy waves, the boaters look relaxed. The anchor that replaced the boy in the bow was understood to symbolize hope. The boy holding the tiller looks forward to the horizon, a statement of optimism about his future and that of the young United States. Read more...
A Visit from the Old Mistress is an 1876 painting by American artist Winslow Homer. It was one of several works that Homer created during a mid-1870s visit to Virginia, where he had served as a war correspondent during the Civil War. Scholars have noted that the painting's composition is taken from Homer's earlier painting Prisoners from the Front, which depicts a group of captive Confederate soldiers defiantly regarding a Union officer. It, along with Homer's other paintings of black southern life from this period, have been praised as an "invaluable record of an important segment of life in Virginia during the Reconstruction." Read more...
Winslow Homer. Eight Bells (1886). Oil on canvas, 64.1 × 76.5 cm (25.2 in × 30.1 in). Addison Gallery of American Art.
Eight Bells is an 1886 oil painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts two sailors determining their ship's position. It is one of Homer's best-known paintings and the last of his major paintings of the 1880s that dramatically chronicle man's relationship to the ocean. Read more...
The Cotton Pickers, 1864 by Winslow Homer
The Cotton Pickers, 1876 is an oil painting by Winslow Homer of two young African-American women in a cotton field.
Stately, silent and with barely a flicker of sadness on their faces, the two black women in the painting are unmistakable in their disillusionment: they picked cotton before the war and they are still picking cotton afterward.
It is oil on canvas, 24 1/16 x 38 1/8 in. (61.12 x 96.84 cm). Read more...
Cannon Rock is an 1895 oil painting by Winslow Homer. It is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. Read more...
The Boat Builders is an oil painting on panel by American landscape painter Winslow Homer, which is held in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Read more...
The Brierwood Pipe, 1864 by Winslow Homer
The Brierwood Pipe, 1864 is an oil painting by Winslow Homer of two men from the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry(Duryee Zouaves).
The title may refer to a popular poem of the day about the 5th New York Zouaves, titled "The Brier-Wood Pipe." "Two of the most famous Zouave outfits in the Army of the Potomac were from New York, Duryees and Hawkins's." Read more...- The Gulf Stream is an 1899 oil painting by Winslow Homer. It shows a man in a small dismasted rudderless fishing boat struggling against the waves of the sea, and was the artist's last statement on a theme that had interested him for more than a decade. Homer vacationed often in Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean. Read more...
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Selected images
The Fox Hunt, 1893. Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 174 cm. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 1868, oil on panel (Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine)
Winslow Homer, 1880,
photo by Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896)Eastern Point Light, 1880, Princeton University Art Museum
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind),
1873–76, oil on canvas
(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)The Fog Warning, 1885, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Winslow Homer, Crossing the Pasture, 1871–72, Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Three Fisher Girls, Tynemouth, watercolor on paper 1881, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
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