Winslow Homer
America’s realist painter.
Winslow Homer began as an illustrator during the Civil War and went on to paint the sea and people struggling against nature.
Winslow Homer was born in 1836 in Boston. His mother was an amateur watercolourist and encouraged his talent. He was apprenticed to a lithographer and then became a freelance illustrator for the magazine Harper's Weekly. As a painter he was almost entirely self-taught.
During the American Civil War he was sent to the front as an artist. His pictures showed the soldiers’ everyday life rather than great battles. The painting Prisoners from the Front (1866) in the Metropolitan Museum in New York depicts an encounter between a Union officer and captured Confederate soldiers. It made his name. In 1867 he spent almost a year in Paris. After the war he painted American rural life and children at play, as in the well-known picture of boys in a meadow.
In 1881–82 Homer lived in the fishing village of Cullercoats in north-east England. The encounter with the North Sea and the harsh lives of the fishing families transformed his art. On returning home he settled in 1883 at Prouts Neck on the coast of Maine, where he lived for the rest of his life. There he painted the sea, the rocks and people struggling against nature. The Gulf Stream (1899) in the Metropolitan Museum shows a lone man in a damaged boat surrounded by sharks and an approaching storm.
Homer was also one of the leading watercolourists in the United States. On trips to the Bahamas, Florida and the Adirondack Mountains he painted quick, luminous watercolours of the sea, palm trees, fishermen and hunters. He never married and lived an increasingly secluded life at Prouts Neck.
Homer died in 1910. He is regarded as one of the greatest American artists of the 19th century. His realism, his depiction of the power of nature and his solitary figures influenced later American painters, among them Edward Hopper.