| Winslow Homer | ||
| Birth Date: February 24, 1836 |
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| Death Date: September 29, 1920 Artist Gallery |
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| What do you think she could be contemplating while she is sitting in a meadow on a warm summer’s day? Perhaps looking for a four leaf clover. Will luck find her today?
Winslow Homer’s watercolors are acknowledged to be among the greatest achievements in American art. Created largely during working vacations, Homer was free from the anxiety of what he considered more serious work in oil. An exceptional colorist with exquisite technique and a sincere portrayal of his subjects-that was the great Winslow Homer. The man himself said, when I select a thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears.
Harper’s Weekly sent the young artist to the battlefields of the Civil War where his treatment of the subject matter was always natural and honest. Later, after a brief visit to Europe, Homer became as preoccupied with light as his French Impressionist contemporaries were. However, his impressionistic light shone on genre scenes which were uniquely American in appearance.
Homer spent much of the summer of 1878 at Houghton farm in Mountainville, New York (near West Point). The farm belonged to Lawson Valentine, a family friend. He made many watercolors and drawings that summer depicting rural children chatting over a fence, picking fruit, leaning against a tree, or lying in the grass, lazily enjoying their pastoral surroundings…image of a farm life that was slipping away in the post-Civil War rush toward urbanization.
I prefer every time a picture composed and painted outdoors, Homer told the critic George W. Sheldon. This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself.
Winslow Homer was a small, dapper man with a wry sense of humor; he never married and became reclusive when he moved to Prout’s Point, Maine. There as at Houghton Farm, he painted predominately in watercolor and said, You will see, in the future, I will live by my watercolors.
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