HOMER, Winslow
American painter, illustrator and etcher. He was born in Boston, where he later worked as a lithographer and illustrator. In 1861 he was sent to the Civil War battlefront as correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, his work winning international acclaim. Many of his studies of everyday life, such as Snap the Whip (1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), date from the postwar period, during which he was a popular magazine illustrator.
In 1876, Homer abandoned illustration to devote himself to painting. He found his inspiration in the American scene and, eventually, in the sea, which he painted at Prouts Neck, Maine, in the summer and in Key West, Fla., or the Bahamas in the winter. After 1884 he lived the life of a recluse.
Although Homer excelled above all as a watercolourist, his oils and watercolours alike are characterized by directness, realism, objectivity, and splendid colour. His powerful and dramatic interpretations of the sea in watercolour have never been surpassed and hold a unique place in American art. They are in leading museums throughout the United States. Characteristic watercolours are Breaking Storm and Maine Coast (both: Art Institute of Chicago) and The Hurricane (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Characteristic oils include The Gulf Stream (1899) and Moonlight-Wood’s Island Light (both: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) and Eight Bells (1886; Addison Gallery, Andover, Mass.).
Homer was one of the two most admired American late 19th-century artists (the other being Thomas Eakins) and is considered to be the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor life in the USA and its greatest watercolourist. Nominally a landscape painter, in a sense carrying on Hudson River school attitudes, Homer was an artist of power and individuality whose images are metaphors for the relationship of Man and Nature. A careful observer of visual reality, he was at the same time alive to the purely physical properties of pigment and colour, of line and form, and of the patterns they create. His work is characterized by bold, fluid brushwork, strong draughtsmanship and composition, and particularly by a lack of sentimentality.
