Homer, Winslow

Homer, Winslow (b Boston, 24 Feb. 1836; d Prout's Neck, Me., 29 Sept. 1910).
American landscape, marine, and genre painter. Next to Eakins and the expatriate Whistler, he is probably regarded as the greatest American painter of his period. He came to painting from illustration (chiefly for Harper's Weekly) and Prisoners from the Front (1866, Met. Mus., New York), one of his first important oils, has a quality of vivid, unromanticized reportage: ‘When I have selected the thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears.’ In 1867 he visited Paris; he was impressed by Manet's work, but he explored the rendering of light and colour in a different way from the Impressionists—instead of dissolving forms into light and atmosphere, he sought luminosity within a firm construction of clear outline and broad planes of light and dark (Long Branch, New Jersey, 1869, MFA, Boston). The sea was Homer's favourite subject, and after staying at Cullercoats (home of a flourishing artists' colony) on the rugged coast of north-east England in 1881–2 he settled at Prout's Neck on the Maine coast, where he lived in isolation. His pictures of the Maine coast, which represent the power and solitude of the sea and the contest of man with the forces of nature, are his best-known works. He was an artist of considerable originality and power who created an imaginative vision of nature that has come to be accepted as a reflection of the American pioneering spirit. He used watercolour with the force and authority of oil (Inside the Bar, Tynemouth, 1883, Met. Mus.).