"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of American landscape painters in the Public Domain with the third of three 12-piece Exhibitions of works by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), one of the foremost artists of 19th-century America.

 

Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts, descended from generations of New Englanders. Growing up in rural Cambridge, Massachusetts, Homer displayed a special aptitude for painting from a young age. His mother, a gifted watercolor painter herself, was his first teacher and an artistic influence throughout his life.

 

Largely self-taught, Homer actually began his career working as a commercial illustrator before pursuing oil painting. At the age of 19, Homer apprenticed under Boston commercial lithographer J. H. Bufford, producing sheet music covers and other commercial works. With his gift for depicting rural New England life in scenes for magazines such as Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly, Homer’s career as a commercial illustrator would last 20 years.

 

Homer opened his own studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City in 1859, while also attending classes at the National Academy of Design, where he studied under Frédéric Rondel. While he dreamed of studying in Europe, life had other plans for him. From 1861–1865, Harper's 

employed Homer as a sketch artist, sending him to  the front lines of the American Civil War where he sketched battle scenes, camp life, and likenesses of officers and commanders, including the famous Union officer, Major General George B. McClellan. While far from the glamor of studying in Paris, Homer’s experiences as a war correspondent broadened his artistic and creative horizons.

 

Back in his studio, Homer incorporated his war experiences in his painting, and began exhibiting his works at the National Academy of Design. In 1863, after receiving critical acclaim he was elected an Associate Academician, becoming a full member in 1865. Homer’s postwar works tackled the difficult questions left in the wake of the Civil War, including the issue of slavery. Homer finally traveled to Paris in 1867, where he exhibited his paintings at the Exposition Universelle. Influenced by the French Barbizon school and artists such as Jean-François Millet, Homer’s paintings depicted French peasant life in a manner not unlike that of the American rural south.

 

By 1875, Homer had tired of commercial illustration and dedicated himself to oil and watercolor painting. His works grew in popularity after his 1876 exhibition at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The artist would go on to exhibit his works at the Boston Art Club from 1877 through 1909. But in 1902, his primary Gallery was Knoedler & Co. in New York City. In NYC, Homer became a member of "The Tile Club," a group of 31 notable New York painters, sculptors, and architects which included William Merritt Chase and John H. Twachtman.

 

Homer spent the years 1881 and 1882 in the English coastal villages of Cullercoats, Tyne and Wea, where his painting subjects were the daily lives of working men and women. Back in the U.S. in November 1882, Homer showed his English watercolors in New York. The following year Homer moved to his family's estate in a remodeled carriage house in Prouts Neck, Maine. Here he would embark upon another stage of his eclectic painting career, rendering majestic scenes of the mighty Atlantic Ocean. Homer escaped the cold Maine winters of 1884 and 1885 in Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas, where he was commissioned to do a series of watercolors for Century Magazine. He also began making summer trips to Minerva, New York in the Adirondack Mountains, which became the subjects of many outdoor wilderness scenes.

 

Homer died in 1910 in his Prouts Neck studio. He was 74. Today, his Prouts Neck studio is a National Historic Landmark, owned by the Portland Museum of Art, which offers tours.