Artist

National Gallery of Art, Washington

1836, Boston — 1910, Prouts Neck (Scarborough), Maine

American Realism

Timeline

1836

Born in Boston on 24 February<br/>1855

On the path that ran along the rocks at Prouts Neck, Maine, a hand-painted sign warned passersby: “Snakes Snakes Mice!” Behind it, in an old carriage house turned studio facing the Atlantic, lived a man who would not answer his door, walked backward along the beach squinting at the sky, and whose motto, according to a friend, came down to four words: “Mind your own business!” That man, Winslow Homer, is often regarded as the greatest American painter of the nineteenth century.

Born in Boston in 1836 and dead in Maine in 1910, Homer lived through the whole second half of America’s nineteenth century. He drew the Civil War for the illustrated press, painted the rural childhood of postwar America — country schools and outdoor games — and then, in the last part of his life, the sea and those who face it. Almost entirely self-taught, he belonged to no school and made no concessions to fashion.

Unlike Sargent or Mary Cassatt, his contemporaries who settled in Europe, Homer made most of his career in the United States. He spent only about ten months in Paris and less than two years in England. That is what makes him, in American eyes, the national painter par excellence: the one who gave America an image of itself without going through Europe.

Boston and an apprenticeship in images

Winslow Homer was born in Boston on February 24, 1836, into a New England merchant family. He grew up in Cambridge, then still a half-rural town, where he spent an outdoor childhood that echoes throughout his work.

His mother, Henrietta Benson Homer, painted watercolors of flowers with recognized talent and was his first teacher. Young Winslow drew constantly. His father, an enterprising but often unlucky merchant, saw that this gift could become a trade, and in his late teens placed him as an apprentice with a Boston lithographer, John H. Bufford.

The work was tedious: reproducing sheet-music covers, official portraits, commercial images. Homer hated it, but it taught him the essentials of his craft as a draftsman: speed, precision of line, the efficiency of an image meant to be reproduced. Once he came of age, he set up as a freelance illustrator and began supplying drawings to the illustrated papers, then booming.

In 1859 he moved to New York, the capital of the American press. There he briefly took drawing classes and a few lessons in oil painting in the spring of 1861, and that was about the extent of his academic training. The rest Homer taught himself, by looking.

The Civil War

In October 1861, a few months into the war, Harper’s Weekly sent Homer to the Virginia front as an artist-correspondent. Over the following years he made several stays with the Union army, drawing what the photography of the day, with its long exposure times, could not capture.

But Homer was not a battle artist. What interested him was the soldiers’ daily life: the waiting, the boredom, the chores, the meals, the letter written at the bivouac, the card game, the evening music. His engravings, reproduced in hundreds of thousands of copies, made his name known across the country.

C’est aussi pendant la guerre, vers 1863, qu’il commença à peindre à l’huile. Ses premiers tableaux reprennent les sujets de ses dessins, avec une gravité nouvelle. Home, Sweet Home, aujourd’hui à la National Gallery of Art, montre deux soldats dans un camp, écoutant au loin une fanfare jouer la chanson qui donne son titre au tableau : une image de la nostalgie, sans un seul combat. En 1866, Prisoners from the Front, aujourd’hui au Metropolitan Museum, le révéla comme peintre : un officier de l’Union face à trois prisonniers confédérés, chaque visage portant une manière différente de vivre la défaite.

The painting caused a sensation. Already elected to the National Academy of Design in 1865, Homer was now recognized as one of the most promising painters of his generation.

Ten months in Paris

À la fin de 1866, Homer partit pour la France. Deux de ses tableaux de la guerre de Sécession, dont Prisoners from the Front, devaient être présentés à l’Exposition universelle de 1867, à Paris. Il resta une dizaine de mois en France, entre la capitale et la campagne.

Little is known about this trip, and Homer, a notoriously private man, said almost nothing about it. He visited the Exposition, painted a few rural landscapes, and no doubt saw contemporary French painting at close range. His work of the following years has often been compared with that of the Barbizon painters, or with the young open-air painting that would lead to Impressionism: the same taste for natural light, the same rejection of anecdote, the same attention to scenes of rural life.

Historians remain cautious about that influence. Homer never named a master, and his manner was already formed before the trip. But one thing is certain: after Paris his palette lightened, his compositions grew simpler, and open-air light became one of his great subjects.

The stay was his only extended contact with France. Unlike so many American artists of his generation, Homer never sought a career in Europe. He returned to New York, and it was in America that he built his work.

Postwar America

The 1870s were the years of an America rebuilding itself, and Homer became its painter. He left military subjects behind for childhood, the countryside and leisure: boys playing after school in Snap the Whip (1872), teachers in wooden schoolhouses, women strolling by the sea, children in the fields.

These pictures, luminous and free of rhetoric, show a peaceful rural America, as though the war had cleared the way for a fresh start. Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), painted between 1873 and 1876, is the most famous of them: a young man and three boys in a small sailboat racing before the wind under an immense sky. The National Gallery of Art, which owns it, sees in it a possible echo of the country’s changing mood after the war.

Critics, for their part, remained divided. In 1875 the young Henry James, then a fledgling critic and novelist, wrote that Homer was “almost barbarously simple” and, to his eye, “horribly ugly” — before conceding that “there is nevertheless something one likes about him.” The remark sums up the effect this direct, unpolished painting had at the time: it disconcerted as much as it charmed.

Yet Homer did not paint an ideal America. In the mid-1870s he went back to Virginia at least once to depict the lives of formerly enslaved people after Emancipation, with a dignity and an absence of caricature rare in American painting of the time.

This was also the decade when he took up watercolor in earnest, a medium he would carry to rarely equaled heights. He gradually gave up illustration, abandoning it for good around 1875 to devote himself entirely to painting.

Cullercoats and Prouts Neck: meeting the sea

In 1881 Homer left for England and settled in Cullercoats, a fishing village on the North Sea coast near Newcastle. He stayed until November 1882. The stay transformed his art.

At Cullercoats he discovered a hard, gray, dangerous sea, and a community that lived and died by it. He painted above all the fishermen’s wives, sturdy and grave, waiting for the boats to return, mending nets, carrying baskets of fish. His paintings and watercolors took on a new gravity: the struggle of humans against the elements became his subject.

Back in the United States, Homer settled in 1883 at Prouts Neck, a small rocky peninsula on the Maine coast about ten miles south of Portland, where his family owned land. He turned a former carriage house into a studio facing the Atlantic and lived there until his death, increasingly alone.

That is where his great seascapes were born. In the 1880s he still painted rescue and fishing scenes, with men battling storms. Then, from around 1890, he concentrated on the sea itself: waves breaking on rocks, spray, stormy skies, almost without human figures. Northeaster, now at the Metropolitan Museum, is one of the masterpieces of this period.

The final years

Homer spent his last decades between Prouts Neck and winter or summer trips: to the Adirondacks and Canada, where he fished and hunted, and to Florida, the Bahamas and Bermuda. From these trips he brought back watercolors blazing with tropical light, among the finest in American art. He knew their worth: “In the future I will live by my watercolors,” he once predicted to a friend.

He also painted a few ambitious canvases of sometimes disconcerting boldness. The Gulf Stream, begun in 1899 and reworked until 1906, shows a Black sailor alone on a dismasted boat surrounded by sharks: an image of solitude and danger that drew very different readings from its first showing. Right and Left, painted in 1909, captures two ducks at the instant they are shot in mid-flight, in a strikingly modern composition.

Homer never married and spent his last years in near-total isolation, turning away visitors and interviews. Prouts Neck, he said, was the only life in which he was permitted to mind his own business. He died in his Prouts Neck studio on September 29, 1910, at seventy-four, leaving an unfinished canvas on his easel. He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

The national painter

Homer was already recognized as a master in his lifetime. But his reputation has kept growing since his death, to the point of making him a central figure in American cultural identity.

What sets him apart is first of all his independence. With almost no academic training and no acknowledged master, he built a direct, robust, unsentimental kind of painting that owes as much to his eye as a press illustrator as to his time spent in nature. His manner resembles that of no European, and that is precisely what made it, for Americans, the expression of a national art.

His subjects played their part too. The Civil War, rural childhood, the sea, hunting and fishing, the confrontation with nature: Homer painted America’s great founding stories without ever turning them into propaganda. His pictures remain open, often ambiguous, and that is what gives them their lasting power.

Today his works hang in every major museum in the United States, and his watercolors are considered one of the high points in the history of the medium. Few painters have shaped so deeply the way a country sees itself.

Where to see his work

Homer’s work is almost entirely in the United States.

New York and Washington

The Metropolitan Museum holds a major group, including The Gulf Stream, Northeaster and Prisoners from the Front, as well as many watercolors. The National Gallery of Art in Washington has Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), Right and Left, Home, Sweet Home and dozens of works on paper.

Ailleurs aux États-Unis

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine also hold important works. The Portland museum runs the Prouts Neck studio, open for tours by reservation.