Biography of Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer is widely regarded as one of the forerunners of the great nineteenth-century American Painters. Homer was a New Englander by birth and long ancestry. Circa 1636, Captain John Homer, an Englishman living in the west of England and active in maritime shipping, immigrated to America. He settled in Massachusetts where, almost two centuries later, his descendant Winslow Homer was born in Boston on February 24th 1836. Winslow grew up in the nearby village of Cambrige, a short walk from Harvard University. His mother was, like his father, of old New England Yankee stock, and he undoubtedly inherited her artistic talent. She encouraged him as a child, when he started to show an aptitude for drawing, she was a skillful amateur watercolorist. Around the age of eighteen Homer became apprenticed to a Boston lithographer, John H. Bufford, here he learned to copy other people’s drawings onto printing stones, he also produced sheet-music covers and other commercial works. His only form of training was at local art classes, where he learned the basic principles and styles of art. He also studied under Frederick Rondel, a well-known painter in Boston. This lasted for roughly two to . . .
From 1881 until 1882 he lived in a fishing village on the North East coast of England called Cullercoats, he stayed here for eighteen months, which no doubt led to a permanent change in the subject matter of his paintings. During this time period on the late 1860’s and 1870’s, Homer traveled during the summers to the Adirondaks, as well as New York state, and to seaside resorts in New Jersey and Massachusetts. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Homer began to report scenes of military life. Upon his return to New York he closed his studio and moved to Prout’s Neck, Maine, a rockbound peninsula a few miles south of Portland. These works show Homer’s keen interest and awareness of social change and his devotion to recording American manners. His work was always well received by critics, but did not sell quite as well. Winslow also loved to paint children at play, shown in his Snap the Whip, and farm life, as in Weaning the Calf. During this time Homer began focusing his paintings on images of former slaves and exploring the theme of man versus nature. He drew his illustrations on wood blocks that were then engraved by others, following the usual practice of the time. In 1859 he moved from Boston to New York to be closer to the Harper’s office and also because he was now determined to become a painter. Two of Homer’s own paintings of the Civil War in America were on exhibit in the Art section of the Exposition Universelle in 1867. The sketches he created, highly focused and personal vignettes of the sometimes dangerous, sometimes lonely lives of individual soldiers. He also made a big focus of the fishermen’s wives, who worked in and around the village and the torment they endured waiting for their husbands to come back. He drew a great number of the scenes from the war for the front cover, most of them from the battles in Virginia. He took a few lessons at the National Academy but soon discontinued them, finding them of little value to the skill of his work.
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