Winslow Homer

(Feb.24, 1836 Boston - Sep.29, 1910 Maine) American Oil Painting Artist Biography.

Winslow Homer was almost entirely self-taught as a painter. In 1857 he sought work as a magazine illustrator, becoming a regular contributor to the popular Harper's Weekly. His illustrations, primarily engravings, were characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrasts of light and dark and lively groupings of figures. These qualities were to remain important characteristics throughout his art career.

During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Homer made several trips to the Virginia front, where he painted his first important oil paintings, Home Sweet Home (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) a work notable for its cool objectivity and vigorous realism. In 1856 he spent a year in France, although his interest in the possibilities of natural light in oil painting ran parallel to that of the early Impressionists, he was not directly influenced by Impressionism nor French art. In 1873 he began working in watercolor, a medium that became as important to him as oil painting. His subject matter of the 1870s was primarily rural or idyllic landscapes, scenes of farm life, children at play and resort scenes filled with fashionable women, one of the best known of the being Long Branch, New Jersey (1869, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

A stay in England from 1881 to 1882, living in a fishing village, led to a permanent change in his subject matter. Thereafter he concentrated on large-scale scenes of nature, particularly seascape marine oil paintings of fishermen and their families. Returning to the States and taking up solitary residence at Prout's Neck on the Maine coast, he produced such marine oil painting masterpieces of realism as Fog Warning. In it the drama of the sea scene is imbued with an epic, heroic quality that symbolizes the dominant theme of his maturity, human struggle with the forces of nature.

After 1884, Homer spent many of his winters in Florida, in the Bahamas and in Cuba. His many scenes of the Tropics were painted mostly in watercolor and his technique was the most advanced of its day, loose, fresh, spontaneous, almost impressionistic, although it never lost its basic grounding in naturalism. In 1899 he painted one of his most powerful seascapes, frightening Gulf Stream (Metropolitan Museum, NY), which depicts a solitary black sailor in a small, disabled boat, surrounded by sharks and alone on a billowing sea.