HOMER, Winslow (Boston, 1836 – Prout’s Neck, 1910)
Winslow Homer was born on 24 February 1836 in Boston, Massachusetts, into an old New England family. His mother’s talents as watercolourist and the constant support of his brother Charles were important factors in his development as an artist. In 1842 the family moved to Cambridge. In 1855 he began a two-year apprenticeship at J. H. Bufford’s lithography shop in Boston. In 1857 he created his first illustrations for Ballou’s Pictorial and began his collaboration with Harper’s Weekly (where he continued to submit illustrations until 1874). In 1859 he moved to New York City and studied art briefly under Frederic Rondel and at National Academy of Design; he became friends with several New York artists, especially Eastman Johnson. During the summer of 1861 he made his first visit to his new family home in Belmont, Massachusetts, near Waverly Oaks.
In the same year, with the outbreak of the Civil War, he received Harper’s commission to illustrate life at the front lines, subsequently the subject of oil paintings. In 1864 he was elected Associate of the National Academy of Design. In 1866 he exhibited Prisoners from the Front (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), his first major success. In December 1866 he sailed to France; copied at Louvre and attended the Exposition Universelle (where he exhibited two pictures). In 1870 he made the first of many autumn visits to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, camping and fishing at North Woods Club. In 1873 he spent the summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts (where he returned in 1880) and worked in watercolours. During the mid-1870s he visited Virginia and painted scenes of Negro life. In the spring of 1881 he departed for a 20-month stay on the north-east coast of England, watershed in life and art. In November 1882 he returned to the United States with a large group of watercolours, charcoal drawings and some oils: source material for paintings of the next several years. In 1884 he settled in Prout’s Neck, Maine, where he lived for the remainder of life. In 1885 he travelled to Nassau and Cuba and painted his first brilliant tropical watercolours. He continued to visit Florida and the Caribbean islands. From 1890 he produced great landscapes. He died on 29 September 1910, at Prout’s Neck, with his brother Charles close by.
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