ART & ARTISTS: 2011-04-24

Friday, 29 April 2011

Winslow Homer - Part 2

Some more chronological works by Winslow Homer. For biographical information see Part 1 of this post.

1882 Fisherwoman
watercolour

1882 Mending the Nets
watercolour and gouache

1883 Incoming Tide, Scarboro Maine
watercolour

1884 The Life Line
oil on canvas

1885 Santiago de Cuba Street Scene
watercolour

1885 Sponge Fishing, Nassau
watercolour

1889 The Red Canoe
watercolour

1890 Sunlight on the Coast
oil on canvas

1892 Hound and Hunter
oil on canvas

1892 Hound and Hunter
watercolour

1892 Hunter in the Adirondacks
watercolour

1892 On the Trail
watercolour

1894 Casting, Number Two
watercolour

1894 The Adirondack Guide
watercolour

1898 The Turtle Pound
watercolour

1899 After the Hurricane
watercolour

1899 Salt Kettle, Bermuda
watercolour

1899 The Gulf Stream
oil on canvas

1904 Red Shirt, Homosassa, Florida
watercolour

Wednesday, 27 April 2011

Winslow Homer (1836 – 1910) was 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 pre-eminent figure in American art.

He was largely self-taught, and began his career working as a commercial illustrator. He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works, though it’s for his skill with watercolour that he’s best known now, and the reason that I personally admire his work. I spent a decade of my own career dedicated to watercolour.

Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836, the second of the three children, all sons, of Henrietta Benson and Charles Savage Homer. His artistic education consisted chiefly of his apprenticeship to the Boston commercial lithographer John H. Bufford, and a few lessons in painting from Frédéric Rondel after that. Following his apprenticeship, Homer worked as a free-lance illustrator for such magazines as Harper's Weekly.

The Bathers
wood engraving for Harper's Weekly

Returning to America in 1883, he settled at Prout's Neck, Maine, where he would live for the rest of his life. He continued to travel widely, to the Adirondacks, Canada, Bermuda, Florida, and the Caribbean, in all those places painting the watercolours upon which much of his later fame would be based. In 1890 he painted the first of the series of seascapes at Prout's Neck that were the most admired of his late paintings in oil. Homer died in his Prout's Neck studio in 1910.