Winslow Homer And His Cullercoats Paintings

When Winslow Homer sailed to England in March of 1881, he was already well established as a leading member of his generation of American artists. Critics often referred to him as the “most American of American artists,” combining praise with the implication that his work was provincial compared to that of his more European-trained American contemporaries. However, upon his return, after a year and a half spent in the seaside village of Cullercoats, Homer’s work garnered rave reviews and gained a new appreciation among art dealers. In this book, Tatham’s detailed account of Homer’s time in Cullercoats offers a perceptive reappraisal of both the village’s influence on his work and the paintings themselves. In his Cullercoats paintings, Homer took as his main subject the lives and labors of the village’s women and their strong sense of community. In many ways, these paintings stand among Homer’s most original and perceptive depictions of women, but they also display his masterly uses of watercolor. The Cullercoats paintings show Homer in a new light, and Tatham’s revelatory account provides the long-overdue attention they deserve.

A revelatory exploration of Winslow Homer’s engagement with photography, shedding new light on his celebrated paintings and works on paper One of the greatest American painters of the 19th century, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) also maintained a deep engagement with photography throughout his career. Focusing on the important, yet often-overlooked, role that photography played in Homer’s art, this volume exposes Homer’s own experiments with the camera (he first bought one in 1882). It also explores how the medium of photography and the larger visual economy influenced his work as a painter, watercolorist, and printmaker at a moment when new print technologies inundated the public with images. Frank Goodyear and Dana Byrd demonstrate that photography offered Homer new ways of seeing and representing the world, from his early commercial engravings sourced from contemporary photographs to the complex relationship between his late-career paintings of life in the Bahamas, Florida, and Cuba and the emergent trend of tourist photography. The authors argue that Homer’s understanding of the camera’s ability to create an image that is simultaneously accurate and capable of deception was vitally important to his artistic practice in all media. Richly illustrated and full of exciting new discoveries, Winslow Homer and the Camera is a long-overdue examination of the ways in which photography shaped the vision of one of America’s most original painters.

In this title, David Tatham demonstrates that Winslow Homer's 'Adirondack oils and watercolours constitute a highly original examination of the human race's relationship to the natural world at a time when long-established assumptions about humans, nature, and art itself were undergoing profound change.

"With this psychosocial approach, Johns relates the wood-engraved illustrations of Homer's early career to the values of his family; his images of the Civil War to the context of his young manhood; his paintings of the social scene and young women's place in it to his own potential for marriage; his images of fisherwomen at Cullercoats and fishermen at Prout's Neck to his interior vision during middle age; and his intrigue with the sea in his late works to his identification with the larger processes of the universe."--BOOK JACKET.

This work examines Homer's artistic accomplishments. It focuses not only on his use of various media, but also on the suites of works on the same subject that reflect the artist's modern practice of thinking and working serially and thematically.

Catalog of an exhibition held at Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, November 11, 2017-February 4, 2018, and at Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 2-May 20, 2018.