49 Facts About Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects.

Winslow Homer is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art.

Largely self-taught, Winslow Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator.

Winslow Homer subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium.

Winslow Homer worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.

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Winslow Homer's mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist and Homer's first teacher.

Winslow Homer took on many of her traits, including her quiet, strong-willed, terse, sociable nature; her dry sense of humor; and her artistic talent.

Winslow Homer had a happy childhood, growing up mostly in then-rural Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Winslow Homer was an average student, but his art talent was evident in his early years.

Winslow Homer worked repetitively on sheet music covers and other commercial work for two years.

Winslow Homer contributed illustrations of Boston life and rural New England life to magazines such as Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly at a time when the market for illustrations was growing rapidly and fads and fashions were changing quickly.

The Winslow Homer House, owned by the Belmont Woman's Club, is open for public tours.

Winslow Homer's mother tried to raise family funds to send him to Europe for further study but instead Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War, where he sketched battle scenes and camp life, the quiet moments as well as the chaotic ones.

Back at his studio, Winslow Homer would regain his strength and re-focus his artistic vision.

Winslow Homer set to work on a series of war-related paintings based on his sketches, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, Home, Sweet Home, and Prisoners from the Front .

Winslow Homer exhibited paintings of these subjects every year at the National Academy of Design from 1863 to 1866.

Winslow Homer was interested in postwar subject matter that conveyed the silent tension between two communities seeking to understand their future.

Winslow Homer's oil painting A Visit from the Old Mistress shows an encounter between a group of four freed slaves and their former mistress.

Winslow Homer composed this painting from sketches he had made while traveling through Virginia.

Winslow Homer's realism was objective, true to nature, and emotionally controlled.

Winslow Homer's most praised early painting, Prisoners from the Front, was on exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris at the same time.

Winslow Homer did not study formally but he practiced landscape painting while continuing to work for Harper's, depicting scenes of Parisian life.

Winslow Homer painted approximately one dozen small paintings during the stay.

Unfortunately, Winslow Homer was very private about his personal life and his methods, but his stance was clearly one of independence of style and a devotion to American subjects.

In 1875, Winslow Homer quit working as a commercial illustrator and vowed to survive on his paintings and watercolors alone.

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Breezing Up, Winslow Homer's iconic painting of a father and three boys out for a spirited sail, received wide praise.

In 1877, Winslow Homer exhibited for the first time at the Boston Art Club with the oil painting, An Afternoon Sun, .

Winslow Homer became a member of The Tile Club, a group of artists and writers who met frequently to exchange ideas and organize outings for painting, as well as foster the creation of decorative tiles.

Winslow Homer started painting with watercolors on a regular basis in 1873 during a summer stay in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

In re-establishing his love of the sea, Winslow Homer found a rich source of themes while closely observing the fishermen, the sea, and the marine weather.

Winslow Homer spent two years in the English coastal village of Cullercoats, Northumberland.

Winslow Homer's palette became constrained and sober; his paintings larger, more ambitious, and more deliberately conceived and executed.

In 1883, Winslow Homer moved to Prouts Neck, Maine, and lived at his family's estate in the remodeled carriage house seventy-five feet from the ocean.

In Undertow, depicting the dramatic rescue of two female bathers by two male lifeguards, Winslow Homer's figures "have the weight and authority of classical figures".

At fifty years of age, Winslow Homer had become a "Yankee Robinson Crusoe, cloistered on his art island" and "a hermit with a brush".

Winslow Homer replaced the turbulent green storm-tossed sea of Prouts Neck with the sparkling blue skies of the Caribbean and the hardy New Englanders with Black natives, further expanding his watercolor technique, subject matter, and palette.

Winslow Homer's tropical stays inspired and refreshed him in much the same way as Paul Gauguin's trips to Tahiti.

Winslow Homer lived frugally and fortunately his affluent brother Charles provided financial help when needed.

Winslow Homer frequently visited Key West, Florida between 1888 and 1903.

Winslow Homer found inspiration in summer trips to the North Woods Club, near the hamlet of Minerva, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains.

In 1893, Winslow Homer painted one of his most famous "Darwinian" works, The Fox Hunt, which depicts a flock of starving crows descending on a fox slowed by deep snow.

Winslow Homer became free of the responsibilities of caring for his father, who had died two years earlier.

Winslow Homer continued producing excellent watercolors, mostly on trips to Canada and the Caribbean.

Winslow Homer died in 1910 at the age of 74 in his Prouts Neck studio and was interred in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Winslow Homer's painting, Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River, remains unfinished.

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Winslow Homer never taught in a school or privately, as did Thomas Eakins, but his works strongly influenced succeeding generations of American painters for their direct and energetic interpretation of man's stoic relationship to an often neutral and sometimes harsh wilderness.

Winslow Homer's work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.

Unlike many artists who were well known for working in only one art medium, Winslow Homer was prominent in a variety of art media, as in the following examples:.

Later, when Winslow Homer spent the years between 1881 and 1882 in the village of Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear, his paintings depicting shores and coastal landscapes changed.