Winslow homer biography and paintings civil war

Become a member. A national membership group of museum friends who share a love of American art and craft. A membership group for young professionals interested in the American art experience. Biography Painter and graphic artist. More Information. Artist Biography. Playlist Description Transcript. June 30, — September 16, November 3, — February 4, The exhibition is the first time this remarkable collection has been on display in Washington, D.

Marie and Hugh Halff, who live in San Antonio, acquired these masterpieces during the past 20 years. November 21, — May 24, Graphic Masters I: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum is the first in a series of special installations that celebrate the extraordinary variety and accomplishment of American artists' works on paper.

He enjoyed isolation and was inspired by privacy and silence to paint the great themes of his career: the struggle of people against the sea and the relationship of fragile, transient human life to the timelessness of nature. By abouthowever, Homer left narrative behind to concentrate on the beauty, force, and drama of the sea itself.

In their dynamic compositions and richly textured passages, his late seascapes capture the look and feel and even suggest the sound of masses of onrushing and receding water. They remain among his most famous today, appreciated for their virtuoso brushwork, depth of feeling, and hints of modernist abstraction. Weinberg, H. Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr.

Winslow Homer. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Press, This simple painting, which appears so quintessentially American in tone demonstrates the influence of his brief stay in France in the previous decade. The subject reflects concerns he shared with the Realist painters of France who similarly put the working figures in the immediate foreground of the composition.

There is also a shift in Homer's gestural brushstrokes, which became increasingly confident after his trip to Paris, most notably in the sky and the sea. Finally, the compositional structure reveals a debt to the lessons of Japonism - the juxtaposition of extremely close-up objects against those in the deep background are seen from a slightly elevated position.

In both style and subject, Breezing Up anticipates themes that will resurface and dominate his oeuvre after his second trip to Europe in Homer often turned to watercolor when he traveled, including during the period he spent in the fishing village of Cullercoats, England. Originally titled, "Far Away from Billingsgate," this watercolor was later renamed Mending the Netsafter Homer scratched away the scenery behind the two engaged in the title activity.

The simplicity of the local lifestyle appealed to his interest and gave him a new selection of genre scenes loosely related to his increasing interest in marine scenes. The high level of detail in the work, especially in the figures' winslow homer biography and paintings civil war and the fishing net, evidences Homer's great skill with the difficult medium.

The women wear tattered clothes and are focused on their work, a sharp contrast to Homer's earlier compositions of genteel women often engaged in recreational activities. It was the style, more than the subject, of Homer's English period that seems to have caught his critics off guard, with one noting in the New York Times"They are English in method and style.

One needs to read the signed named before believing that the maker of those British watercolors is the same who used to rouse the wrath or admiration of the critics by his quaint conceits, his bald oddities, his lovely transcripts of scenes that only he knew how to depict. In this painting, the influence of Japanese prints, first seen on his Paris trip inmanifests.

Homer's largest canvas, Fox Hunt is a strong example of the subjects the artist focused on in the s as he largely turned away from depictions of men and women working in and interacting with nature. Instead, the artist focused on representing the natural world exclusively. Here, he has painted a dramatic winter scene with a starved fox attempting to survive an attack by a murder of hungry crows.

The crows loom large overhead while the fox is shown mid-stride, although clearly slowed by the deep winter snow - the whole lending the canvas a sense of sublime urgency. The traditional roles are reversed in this scene, for the fox who usually hunts here becomes the hunted. The paw of the struggling creature reaches forth, pointing to the only sign of vegetation, bright red berries, a poisonous breed, starkly placed against the cold white snow.

An allusion, perhaps to one anticipated outcome of this scene. However, the sharp diagonal created by the fox, matched by the artist's signature in the lower left corner, suggests a sense of motion for the animal and allows the viewer to determine the conclusion to this dramatic scene. The strong diagonal lines of the composition, the juxtaposition of objects both near and far, and the large flat areas of color are all indicative of this influence.

Additionally, the unusual vantage point, slightly above and looking down, is another technique often associated with the earlier prints. Here, it effectively puts the viewers nearly in line with the hovering crows, while emphasizing the struggling fox as the primary focus of the viewer's attention.

Winslow homer biography and paintings civil war

The painting was immediately successful; purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts shortly after it was completed in It was the first painting by Homer to enter a public collection. Homer's visionary seascapes suggest a departure from his Realist inclinations into the Romantic territory of the sublime. Painted with the loose brushstrokes he had cultivated since the s, Weatherbeaten depicts a prevalent subject of his late career: the rocky coastline of Maine on a stormy, overcast afternoon.

This lonely vision of a desolate sea excites the viewer's sensibilities. Although based on the natural views of the landscape, Homer removed elements of the natural scenery in order to emphasize a sense of the eternal reach of the sea. One can imagine the sound of the waves, the smell of the salty water, the texture of the weather-beaten rocks, and the cool mists rising from the crashing waves.

Works such as these offered an anchor to an American public during a period where the effects of rapid industrialization provoked great economic change and social anxiety. In place of the urban and industrial, the viewer is captivated by the eternal cycles of the natural world. Like his predecessors associated with the Hudson River School earlier in the century, Homer removed the increasing signs of tourism to depict an image of uninhabited nature.

Stripped on any non-essentials, Homer's biographer, William Howe Downes, described the impact of this painting inwriting: "Reality is made more real; we are acutely alive when brought into its presence. Our horizons expand The family moved when young Winslow was six years of age to the nearby rural town of Cambridge. His mother was an amateur watercolorist who taught her artistic son the rudiments of her craft; their shared affinity for the arts fostered a close relationship that lasted throughout their lives.

His father, on the other hand, was a largely-failed businessman and, in the words of art historian and curator Nicolai Cikovsky, an eccentric in "behavior and appearance. As Cikovsky details in the winslow homer biography and paintings civil war catalogue for the comprehensive exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. Bufford, a prominent commercial lithographer in Boston, when Winslow reached 19 years of age.

Although this period represents the closest experience resembling any formal training, creating illustrations for popular sheet music, Homer would later describe these two years as merely a "treadmill existence. Although Homer quickly gained stature, creating works for magazines like Ballou's Pictorial and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in Boston, as well as the influential Harper's Weekly in New York, he would soon reveal his true ambition: to become a painter.

Accordingly, inHomer moved to New York which was by then a major center of both publishing and artistic activity, where fierce rivalry between the legacy of the older generation of Hudson River School artists confronted the new trends imported from Europe. Shortly after establishing his studio in the city, Homer enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Design in the fall of that same year.

For the young artist, Europe beckoned as the next logical step to hone his developing skills, but the escalation of the US Civil War put such plans on hold. Winslow Homer's early career as a freelance illustrator brought him into direct contact with the realities of the Civil War. Within six months of the war's outbreak, Harper's Weekly assigned Homer to cover the war from the front lines, which proved a turning point in his personal and artistic development.

During Homer's multiple visits to the camps of the Northern troops, he produced numerous studies for engravings ranging from genre scenes to crowded scenes of conflict. Yet, it was his nuanced depictions of the everyday lives of the common soldiers which dominate his oeuvre from this period. These sketches later formed the basis of his commercial illustrations and today also provide a unique view into the changing technologies of modern warfare, most notably in The Army of the Potomac - A Sharp Shooter on Picket Duty During this time, Homer also made his "professional debut" as a painter with great success at the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design in with two paintings, Home, Sweet Home and The Last Goose at Yorktownboth focused on the daily life of Union soldiers.

After the war's end, Homer's wartime sketches continued to inform a series of paintings, most notably Veteran in a New Field and Prisoners on the Frontwhich secured his reputation as an artist and remain among his best-known paintings to this day. But to Homer it was a tragedy, and sharpshooters were the grim technicians of modern rifle technology.

In the foreground, speckled on scrap wood near a dead campfire, are holly berries, tiny and blood-red. Sackler Museum, Broadway, Cambridge, from to p. For additional information or upcoming talks, visit the website. Curator takes alternative route through cartographic history and finds a few surprises. Take our research-based quiz for tips on improving recall when it matters most.