Winslow Homer: 8 works

'One of America's master painters, Winslow Homer began his career as an illustrator during the Civil War. In the late 1860s, he turned his acute observational and technical skills to oil painting, depicting figures bathed in sunlight out-of-doors.'

'uring the decades following the Civil War, Winslow Homer forged his reputation as America's foremost painter of everyday life. Homer's realist depictions of laboring farmers, rugged wilderness guides, and storm-tossed New England fishermen stressed the powerful and sometimes perilous relationship between man and nature.'

'A meditation on marine life, Winslow Homer's Three Boys in a Dory with Lobster Pots harkens back to the painter's summer sojourn in Gloucester, Massachusetts, two years earlier.'

'Winslow Homer titled this post-Civil War painting "Song of the Lark" to make it clear the young man, like the lark, is an early riser. The virtue of agrarian labor appealed to Homer, who showed farmers as solid individualists, confident in their strength to provide for others.'

'Winslow Homer first visited Virginia during the Civil War as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly. He was so deeply moved by the plight of southern slaves that he returned to Petersburg, Virginia, in the mid-1870s.'

'In 1883 Winslow Homer moved to the small coastal village of Prouts Neck, Maine, where he created a series of paintings of the sea unparalleled in American art. Long inspired by the subject, Homer had spent summers visiting New England fishing villages during the 1870s, and in 1881--82, he made a trip to a fishing community in Cullercoats, England, that fundamentally changed his work and his life.'

'Homer visited the Adirondacks as one of many vacationers who flocked there in the late nineteenth century. The huntsman in Homer's painting is not a visitor but rather a local trapper or guide who has caught a deer and is carrying off its pelt, antlers, and, likely, a pack full of meat.'

'His sojourns in the tropics took him to the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cuba, and various locations in Florida.'