Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer was born in Boston in 1836 and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had almost no formal art training. At nineteen he was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer, and he hated the routine so much that he left the moment he turned twenty-one to work for himself as a freelance illustrator.

His big break was Harper's Weekly, the most widely read illustrated magazine in the country. When the Civil War began, Harper's sent him to the front with the Army of the Potomac. His drawings showed what soldiers' lives actually looked like: camp, boredom, card games, waiting. They also taught him to compose a picture quickly and clearly. His painting Prisoners from the Front (1866), now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, made his name as a painter.

After the war he spent ten months in France, then came home and turned to American country life. Many of the Homer prints in our collection come from this period: boys wading and fishing, children on a beach, a girl carrying a basket, a boy and girl with sheep in a field. These are summer scenes from the 1870s, painted at a time when the country was trying to recover a sense of innocence after the war. Works such as Boys Wading (1873) and Three Boys on the Shore (1873) have the bright, open light he was becoming known for.

The turning point came in 1881–82, when Homer spent about two years in Cullercoats, a fishing village on England's North Sea coast. He watched the women who waited for the boats and the men who worked in dangerous weather, and his work became more serious and more monumental. When he returned, he settled at Prouts Neck on the coast of Maine in 1883, and stayed there for the rest of his life.

At Prouts Neck the sea became his great subject: waves breaking on rocks, fishermen in fog, storms. He also became one of the finest watercolourists America has produced. He painted fresh, fast sheets on fishing trips to the Adirondacks and Quebec, and on winter trips to Florida, the Bahamas and Bermuda. Casting, Number Two (1894) is one of these Adirondack fishing watercolours.

Homer never married and lived largely on his own in Maine, but he was not quite the hermit legend says. He was close to his family and sharp about his business. He died in his studio at Prouts Neck in 1910. Today his paintings hang in the National Gallery of Art, the Met, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and most major American collections, and he is widely considered one of the greatest American painters of the nineteenth century.