Background
Ethnicity:
Winslow Homer came of old New England stock, being descended from Captain John Homer, an Englishman who crossed the Atlantic in his own ship and landed at Boston in the middle of the 17th century.
Winslow Homer was born on February 24, 1836, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was the second of three sons in a family of Charles Savage Homer, a hardware merchant, and Henrietta Maria Homer, a talented amateur watercolorist. Winslow's grandfathers both lived to be over eighty-five, and his father died at the age of eighty-nine.
Education
Winslow Homer's parents both were hardy and long-lived people. His birthplace in Friend Street, Boston, was abandoned when the family, during his infancy, moved to Bulfinch Street. In 1842, when he was six years old, they went to Cambridge, where he spent his boyhood.
Raised in a rural atmosphere, Homer was a quiet, sedate lad, whose favorite sports were boating and fishing. He was very attached to his mother, a talented watercolorist who taught her son the basis of the craft. They maintained such a close relationship throughout the lifespan.
In Cambridge, Homer attended the Washington Grammar School, Brattle Street. Not a brilliant student, he revealed his talent for art very early. By 1847, when he was eleven years of age, he was fond of drawing sketches. In school hours he stealthily illustrated his textbooks.
Homer's father, although a businessman far from art, supported his passion for art and bought him Julian's lithographs of heads, eyes, ears, and noses, and Victor Adam's lithographs of animals. A few years later, when Homer was nineteen, he sent him as an apprentice to a well known Boston lithographer, John Henry Bufford. Winslow Homer remained in Bufford's establishment for two years, designing title pages for sheet music, the portraits of all the members of the state Senate, and a variety of pictorial decorations for commercial uses. Although a kind of a formal training, the period was later described by Homer as a "treadmill experience."
Largely an autodidact artist, Winslow Homer took some lessons in painting from a French landscapist Frédéric Rondel. While living in New York City, he also attended the night school of the National Academy of Design from 1859 to 1863.
Career
When the two years of Winslow Homer's apprenticeship were up, on his twenty-first birthday, he took a studio in Boston, on Winter Street. His first work was done for Ballou's Pictorial. In 1858 he began to send drawings to Harper's Weekly. The next year he went to New York City, where he occupied a studio in Nassau Street for a short time, moving in 1861 to the old University Building in Washington Square.
In 1861, Homer was commissioned by Harper & Brothers to go to Washington for the purpose of making drawings of Lincoln's inauguration, and later to the seat of war in Virginia, where, during the Peninsula campaign, he was unofficially attached to the staff of Colonel Francis C. Barlow. He sent a number of drawings of the early engagements at Yorktown and on the Chickahominy people, together with camp scenes and incidents of army life, to Harper's Weekly.
After his return to New York City, Homer began to paint pictures of war subjects, including the Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, The Last Goose at Yorktown, Home, Sweet Home, and Rations, two of which were exhibited at the National Academy in 1863, being the first paintings by Homer shown there. Two of the pictures were bought by an unknown purchaser, whose identity wasn't revealed until seven years afterward, when he turned out to be Charles S. Homer Jr., Homer's elder brother. Several other war paintings were exhibited at the National Academy during the next three years, among them Prisoners from the Front, which is mainly the best of the artist's works in this class. It was subsequently exhibited at the Paris International Exposition of 1867, also at Brussels and Antwerp, and finally became the property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Winslow Homer made his first voyage to Europe in 1867, and spent about ten months in France, doing little work there. After, he continued to exhibit pictures regularly in the National Academy, but his subjects were different from anything he had previously shown. They were for the most part scenes from farm life, rustic episodes, and landscapes. Up to 1875, the painter also continued to contribute many drawings to Harper's Weekly, and in 1871 he made a series of illustrations for Every Saturday magazine, published in Boston.
His frequent trips to Massachusetts, New Jersey, and the Catskill Mountains, in search of rural subjects, yielded many interesting and original results. He spent the summer of 1873 on an island in Gloucester harbor and made a series of delightful watercolors. Four paintings presented at the National Academy exhibition of 1875 was followed the next year by the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia which brought to view his Snap the Whip and The American Type, with a group of four watercolors.
The first of Homer's important Adirondack pictures, The Two Guides, was painted in 1876 and was shown two years later at the Academy. It was bought by Thomas B. Clarke, who became Homer's most loyal patron, friend, and admirer. Several pictures on the life of African-Americans in Virginia were painted in the late seventies, notably the Visit from the Old Mistress. This work, with four others, was exhibited at the Paris exposition of 1878. During the summer of that year, while at the Houghton Farm, Mountainville, New York, the artist painted a number of excellent watercolors, including the Hillside and the Shepherdess, which figured in the exhibition of the American Watercolor Society a year later.
In 1880, Winslow Homer went to Gloucester, and Annisquam, both Massachusetts, and brought back with him another large portfolio of watercolors, twenty-three of which were in the fourteenth exhibition of the American Watercolor Society. The Camp Fire, an oil painting of a nocturnal scene in the Adirondacks, belongs to the same year. This canvas, a sterling example of the painter's originality, was shown in New York three times, and at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, in 1893.
A new page of Homer's art was revealed in 1881-1882, a page far more serious than any that had gone before. He had found his way to the east coast of England, where, at Tynemouth, he established himself for two seasons and produced a series of watercolors depicting storms at sea and shipwrecks, the life of the fisherman, and the daring deeds of the coastguards, in a manner which combined rare dramatic power, intimate actuality, and beauty of design. Such stirring compositions as Watching the Tempest, Perils of the Sea, The Life Brigade, and The Ship's Boat also belong to this series. These and other equally fine works marked a turning point in the painter's career. They were received with enthusiasm while exhibited in New York City and Boston in 1883 and 1884.They formed a fit prelude to the long line of great marine pieces that was to follow through more than twenty years of Homer's activity.
After his return from England in 1882, Homer determined to leave New York City and make his home at Prouts Neck, in the town of Scarborough, Maine. He turned his back on the city for good in 1884, and from that time to the end of his life in 1910 he lived on the rocky promontory which his achievements have made famous. There he built a little cottage studio with a southerly view over the Atlantic, and a garden behind it. The place was ideal for the purposes of a marine painter. Here Homer stayed habitually until the first severe winter weather arrived, when he departed for Florida, Nassau, or Bermuda, returning in March or April.
In 1884, he had brought from New York City a number of studies and unfinished paintings, begun at Tynemouth and at Atlantic City, New Jersey. The first of these that he completed and exhibited was The Life Line. This work, shown at the National Academy that same year, was the most important story-telling picture that he had made up to that time and had an immediate popular success.
Homer spent the winter of 1885-1886 at Nassau, Bahamas, and on the southern coast of Cuba. This was the first of many winter voyages he made to the tropics, sometimes alone, sometimes in company with his father and his brother Charles. In Nassau and Santiago de Cuba he produced a notable set of watercolors and two or three oil paintings of importance, including The Gulf Stream and Searchlight, Harbor Entrance, Santiago de Cuba. The first of these depicts a stalwart African-American sailor afloat on a dismasted derelict, at the mercy of the elements, on the deep blue waters of the Caribbean. His drifting sloop is followed by hungry sharks. The work has been described and discussed, praised and censured, as much as any picture ever painted in America. The most emphatic praise came from artists, critics, and connoisseurs, who were able to appreciate the originality of the design, the beauty of the color, and the sense of serious import conveyed by the work.
The first few years at Prouts Neck were prolific. The Life Line was the beginning of a notable series of paintings of marine subjects with figures. The Fog Warning, originally called Halibut Fishing, represents a fisherman returning to his schooner in his dory. Banks Fishermen shows two men in a dory hauling in a net full of squirming herring. It was exhibited at the autumn Academy of 1885 and at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago in 1893, under the prosaic title of Herring Fishing. The 1886 painting called Lost on the Grand Banks has some similarity to The Fog Warning but its suggestions of danger and possible death are even more obvious. Two fishermen are seen in a dory; a fog has enveloped them; they are anxiously peering into the swirling vapors, trying to ascertain the direction of their schooner. The canvas was first shown at the St. Botolph Club, Boston, in 1886. Other works from the series of paintings of marine subjects with figures include Undertow and Eight Bells, one of Homer's most stirring deep-sea classics, bought by Thomas B. Clarke.
In 1887, Winslow Homer finished a large figure piece which he considered the most important picture he had painted up to that time. Called Hark! the Lark, it was a replica on an enlarged scale of a watercolor of 1883 painted from studies made in Tynemouth. It was among the pictures exhibited at the loan exhibition of Homer's works at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1908. In the late eighties, Homer made a series of six etchings after his own paintings, choosing for the purpose Eight Bells, The Life Line, Undertow, Perils of the Sea, Mending the Nets, and Fly Fishing, Saranac Lake. Coast in Winter and Sunlight on the Coast were the important marine pieces of 1890. The West Wind, which followed in 1891, is a simple design of few and telling lines in which the strong and steady sweep of the offshore wind is suggested with grandeur of style. The Signal of Distress and A Summer Night, Homer's most interesting illustrative pictures of life at sea, date to the same period. Vivid realism is here combined with a dramatic sense of danger and suspense.
Fifteen of Homer's canvases were exhibited at the Chicago exposition of 1893. He was now, at the age of fifty-seven, in the maturity of his powers. From this time to the end of his life he received every token of appreciation, every evidence of popular favor, and all the honors that can be bestowed upon a successful painter. The story of his closing years is but a recital of a remarkable succession of triumphs. The great picture of 1893 was the Fox Hunt, a large canvas, chiefly remarkable for its original and novel composition. Four masterly marine pieces were painted in 1894, Storm-Beaten, Below Zero, High Cliff, Coast of Maine, and Moonlight, Wood Island Light. For the purpose of painting the sea in cold or stormy weather, Homer had a small portable studio constructed which could be moved to any point where he wished to work.
Many of his famous marine pieces were painted from this convenient shelter. The Northeaster, one of the most impressive of his surf effects, gives the weight and momentum of a tremendous breaker with unsurpassed force. Other pictures of the series which marks Homer as the greatest of marine painters according to Kenyon Cox are Cannon Rock, The Maine Coast, and On a Lee Shore. The Wreck, showing a life-saving crew hurrying to the beach with their boat, had a great success while exhibited at Pittsburgh in 1896.
One of the last of Homer's pictures of the ocean was his 1902 Early Morning after Storm at Sea. It was painted in exactly eight hours of work, but there were long intervals between the four sessions devoted to it. A transient effect of light, which did not last long enough to permit the painter to carry it to a finish at one time, was the effect sought.
Views
Winslow Homer's work is wholly personal and American, there is no trace of foreign influence in it. His art is racy of the soil, even its blemishes are national. It is virile, concise, pungent, and abounds in the "unexpectedness of the usual."
Homer's heroes are the common, rough men who sail the seven seas before the mast, who endure hardships, privations and tyranny, who face danger and think little of it because it is all in the day's work. Although the paintings deal in realities, they aren't prosaic. On the contrary, they contain those essential elements of poetry, deep feeling, and noble form, to which is added in many instances the charm of rhythm. The singular beauty and dignity of many of Homer's canvases, seemingly due to instinct rather than deliberate plan, are salient qualities of his work which more than anything else gives the aspect of unforgettable pictorial authority and weight to his masterpieces.
All the romance of the seaman's life is brought to mind by means of a few dramatic episodes illustrating events which are of almost daily occurrence in real life but which one rarely visualizes. Nothing is exaggerated, no melodramatic emphasis mars the sense of stark truth, the tale is told in the simple and brief terms of a ship's log. But beneath this reserve and brevity of statement is a world of feeling and meaning, all the more poignant because of the absence of insistence.
Quotations:
"A painter who begins and finishes indoors, that which is outdoors, misses a hundred little facts...a hundred little accidental effects of sunshine and shadow that can be reproduced only in the immediate presence of Nature. This making of studies and then taking them home is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself."
"You can't get along without a knowledge of the principles and rules governing the influence of one color upon another. A mechanic might as well try to get along without tools."
"All is lovely outside my house and inside of my house and myself."
"What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work in the right way."
"When you paint, try to put down exactly what you see. Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway."
"Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own."
Personality
Though Winslow Homer never seemed to feel the need of company, he was by no means a hermit. Tales are told of his barring his door to visitors. No doubt he found it irksome at times to interrupt his work, but he was under all circumstances a gentleman. He inherited strong will, terse character and dry Yankee sense of humor from his mother.
There were some years when the artist remained at his home at Prouts Neck, in the town of Scarborough, Maine, all winter long, for the most part in solitude, though he employed a man to come to him for a part of the day to attend to the household chores. Homer did a good deal of his own cooking and all of the garden work. Besides vegetables, he raised many old-fashioned perennials.
Homer's method and style were those of a man who had something to say and who employed no rhetoric, but drove straight to the mark. He cared little for what had gone before him, and he echoed no painter living or dead.
Physical Characteristics:
At nineteen, Winslow Homer was delicately built, rather under the average height but very erect.
