Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters of 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art in general.
Paintings by Winslow Homer
The Fog Warning (1885)
The Fog Warning is one of several paintings on marine subjects by the late-19th-century American painter Winslow Homer (1836–1910). Together with The Herring Net and Breezing Up, painted the same year and also depicting the hard lives of fishermen in Maine, it is considered among his best works on such topics.
After initially making his reputation with paintings on themes related to the Civil War, in the late 1860s and through the 1870s Winslow Homer turned instead to painting people relaxing and at play: children, young women, genre paintings of farm and sea scenes. In 1881–82 he spent time in Cullercoats, in northeast England, where he painted the local fisherman and women. On his return to the US, he settled for good in Prout's Neck, Maine, where his father and brother had recently purchased a large amount of land. His brother had spent his honeymoon in Prout's Neck in 1875, and Winslow had visited him then. In both these locations he returned to painting the sea with more serious themes, such as the hard and dangerous lives of the fishermen and their families, and "humankind’s life-and-death struggles against the sea and the elemental power of nature."
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (1873)
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) is an oil painting by American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a catboat called the Gloucester chopping through that city's harbor under "a fair wind" (Homer's original title). Inside the boat are a man, three boys, and their catch.
Homer began the canvas in New York in 1873, after he had visited Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he first worked in watercolor. He used the sketches made there, of which the most closely related is Sailing the Catboat (1873), for the oil painting, which he worked on over three years. Infrared reflectography has revealed the many changes he made to the composition during this time, including the removal of a fourth boy near the mast and a second schooner in the distance. At one point the adult held both the sheet and the tiller, a position initially adapted from an oil study of 1874 titled The Flirt. The painting's message is positive; despite the choppy waves, the boaters look relaxed. The anchor that replaced the boy in the bow was understood to symbolize hope. The boy holding the tiller looks forward to the horizon, a statement of optimism about his future and that of the young United States.
The Fox Hunt (painting) (1893)
The Fox Hunt is an 1893 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a fox running in deep snow, menaced by hungry crows. His largest single work, it has been described as "Homer's greatest Darwinian painting, arguably his greatest painting of any kind."
The Fox Hunt was painted in Homer's studio at Prouts Neck, Maine during the winter of 1893. The painting depicts a fox foraging for food, who is in turn being hunted by crows driven to predation by hunger. At left several sprigs of red berries breach the snow, and in the distance may be seen the coastline and ocean beneath a deep blue sky.
The Gulf Stream (painting) (1899)
The Gulf Stream is an 1899 oil painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It shows a man in a small dismasted rudderless fishing boat struggling against the storm-tossed waves and perils of the sea, presumably near the Gulf Stream, and was the artist's statement on a theme that had interested him for more than a decade. During the time he explored this theme, Homer, a New Englander, boated often near Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean.
Homer crossed the Gulf Stream numerous times; his first trip to the Caribbean in 1885 seems to have inspired several related works dated from the same year, including a pencil drawing of a dismasted boat, a large watercolor The Derelict (Sharks), and a larger watercolor of the forward part of the boat, Study for "The Gulfstream". A later watercolor study was The Gulfstream of 1889, in which the disabled boat now includes a sailor and flailing shark. Additionally, there are other related watercolors; the shark in Shark Fishing of 1885 was later appropriated for The Gulfstream of 1889, and a watercolor of 1899 entitled After the Hurricane (also known as, After the Hurricane, Bahamas), in which a figure lies unconscious beside his beached boat, with waves and sky suggesting the aftermath of a storm, represents the finale of the watercolor narrative of man against nature.
Dressing for the Carnival (1877)
Dressing for the Carnival is an oil on canvas painting by the American painter Winslow Homer, from 1877. It is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.
Homer painted African Americans, completely avoiding the stereotypes with which their collective image had been flooded during the period of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. The 1870s and 1880s produced innumerable images of African Americans at carnival time, mindless, jolly, condescending.
The Cotton Pickers (1876)
The Cotton Pickers is an 1876 oil painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts two young African-American women in a cotton field.
Stately, silent and with barely a flicker of sadness on their faces, the two black women in the painting are unmistakable in their disillusionment: they picked cotton before the war and they are still picking cotton afterward.
Snap the Whip (1872)
Snap the Whip is the name of two almost identical 1872 oil paintings by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a group of children playing crack the whip in a field in front of a small red schoolhouse. With more of America's population moving to cities, the portrait depicts the simplicity of rural agrarian life that Americans were beginning to leave behind in the post-Civil War era, evoking a mood of nostalgia.
Homer spent several summers in New York's Hudson Valley, and is said to have been inspired to paint this scene by local boys playing at the Hurley schoolhouse.
A Visit from the Old Mistress (1876)
A Visit from the Old Mistress is an 1876 painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It was one of several works that Homer is thought to have created during a mid-1870s visit to Virginia, where he had served for a time as a Union war correspondent during the American Civil War. Scholars have noted that the painting's composition is taken from Homer's earlier painting Prisoners from the Front, which depicts a group of captive Confederate soldiers defiantly regarding a Union officer. Put on display in the northern states for a northern audience, A Visit from the Old Mistress, along with Homer's other paintings of black southern life from the Reconstruction era, has been praised as an "invaluable record of an important segment of life in Virginia during the Reconstruction."
The left side of the painting shows three Black women dressed in torn clothes, one of whom is sitting, one of whom is standing holding a Black baby, and the third of whom is standing in the middle of the composition. They face an old white woman (the titular Old Mistress) dressed in a widow's black dress with a white lace collar, standing upright and looking evenly at the other subjects. The scene takes place in the cabin belonging to the Black women, even though an alternate title of the piece would place it in the mistress's kitchen. The intended tone of the painting is debated by art historians, with earlier writers suggesting a level of "humor" inherent in the composition, and later commentators insisting that the composition is either intended to relate a message of stubborn resistance on the part of the former slaves to their former mistress, or to create an infantilized and harmless image of recently emancipated Blacks.
Moonlight, Wood Island Light (1894)
Moonlight, Wood Island Light is a late 19th-century oil painting by American artist Winslow Homer. The painting is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Moonlight depicts a nighttime seascape outside of Homer's studio in Portland, Maine. The tiny spot of red pigment on the horizon denotes the lighthouse on Wood Island, to the south of Prouts Neck, Scarborough, Maine.
The Life Line (painting) (1884)
The Life Line is a late 19th-century painting by American artist Winslow Homer. Done in oil on canvas, the painting depicts the rescue of a passenger from a stricken ship. The work – one of Homer's most iconic – is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Eight Bells (painting) (1886)
Eight Bells is an 1886 oil painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts two sailors determining their ship's latitude. It is one of the Homer's best-known paintings and the last of his major paintings of the 1880s that dramatically chronicle man's relationship to the ocean.
Eight Bells was the outgrowth of a series of oil paintings that Homer made using three wooden panels he found in the cabin of his brother's sloop at Prouts Neck, Maine. On two of the panels Homer painted scenes of mackerel fleets at Prouts Neck, one at dawn and the other at sunset; on the third he painted a grisaille study of the work that inspired Eight Bells, which depicted a ship's officer standing alone, taking an observation with an octant. Several years earlier, Homer had painted a watercolor on his voyage to England that also showed a sailor performing this activity.
Cannon Rock (painting) (1895)
Cannon Rock is an 1895 oil painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection.
Cannon Rock depicts an offshore wave breaking over a submerged shelf, with water surging into an inlet created by rocks in the foreground.