Winslow Homer In The 1880s

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.

The definitive life of the painter who forged American identity visually, in art and illustration, with an impact comparable to that of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in poetry and prose—yet whose own story has remained largely untold. In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.” Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. He created multivalent visual tales, both quintessentially American and quietly replete with narrative for and about people of all races and ages. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning. Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today. Includes Color Images and Maps

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.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910), arguably the best-known American artist of the nineteenth century, created three distinctly different bodies of work in the course of his long career: paintings, book illustrations, and illustrations for the pictorial press, the magazine-like illustrated journals of his day. A number of books and exhibition catalogues have dealt with his career as a painter, and historian David Tatham treated all of Homer's work as an illustrator of literature in his Winslow Homer and the Illustrated Book. Now, ten years later, Tatham has completed a full, scholarly account of Homer's work for pictorial magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Appleton's Monthly, and Every Saturday. Homer's work for pictorial magazines is substantial, to say the least. It amounts to some 250 wood-engraved images published between 1857 and 1875. These wood engravings are collected assiduously and are exhibited frequently in museums. They differ from Homer's book illustrations in that they are independent from the texts; Homer chose and treated the great majority of his magazine subjects much as he did his paintings. They are, in essence, original works of graphic art. The illustrations reproduced here cover a remarkable range. They constitute the first substantial body of American art about the life of the city streets, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, abolition, and the New Woman. They include compelling treatments of the Civil War, rural childhood, and wilderness. They also comprise an essential contribution to the study of one of the masters of American art.

Recent art histories cast Homer (1836-1910) as the quintessential American artist. This catalog, which accompanies a loan exhibition, explores two highly productive points in Homer's career. Homer spent the summers of 1873 and 1880 at this Massachusetts seaside retreat. His subject matter during both visits focused on children at play and work, but his sketches and watercolors were rendered in distinctly different styles. Homer's fascination with childhood has been linked to a nationwide yearning for lost innocence during the post-Civil War period. While the excellent essays are aimed at scholars, the handsome color plates will attract a broader audience.

Traces the development of Homer as a watercolorist, shows a selection of his landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, and discusses his distinctive style and techniques.