After exhibiting at the National Academy of Design, Homer finally traveled to Paris, France in where he remained for a year. His most praised early painting, Prisoners from the Front, was on exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris at the same time.
He did not study formally but he practiced landscape painting while continuing to work for Harper's, depicting scenes of Parisian life. Homer painted about a dozen small paintings during the stay. Although he arrived in France at a time of new fashions in art, Homer's main subject for his paintings was peasant life, showing more of an alignment with the established French Barbizon school and the artist Millet, then with newer artists Manet and Courbet.
Though his interest in depicting natural light parallels that of the early impressionists, there is no evidence of direct influence as he was already a plein-air painter in America and had already evolved a personal style which was much closer to Manet than Monet.
Unfortunately, Homer was very private about his personal life and his methods even denying his first biographer any personal information or commentary , but his stance was clearly one of independence of style and a devotion to American subjects.
As his fellow artist Eugene Benson wrote, Homer believed that artists "should never look at pictures" but should "stutter in a language of their own. Throughout the s Homer continued painting mostly rural or idyllic scenes of farm life, children playing, and young adults courting, including Country School and The Morning Bell In , Homer quit working as a commercial illustrator and vowed to survive on his paintings and watercolors alone.
Despite his excellent critical reputation, his finances continued to remain precarious. His popular painting, Snap-the-Whip, was exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as was one of his finest and most famous paintings Breezing Up Of his work at this time, Henry James wrote:. Many disagreed with James. Breezing Up, Homer's iconic painting of four boys out for a leisurely sail, received wide praise. The New York Tribune wrote, "There is no picture in this exhibition, nor can we remember when there has been a picture in any exhibition, that can be named alongside this.
The same straightforward sensibility which allowed Homer to distill art from these potentially sentimental subjects also yielded the most unaffected views of African American life at the time, as illustrated in Dressing for the Carnival and A Visit from the Old Mistress From through Homer exhibited often at the Boston Art Club. Works on paper, both drawings and watercolors, were frequently exhibited by Homer beginning in A most unusual sculpture by the Artist, Hunter with Dog - Northwoods, was exhibited in Homer became a member of The Tile Club, a group of artists and writers who met frequently to exchange ideas and organize outings for painting, as well as foster the creation of decorative tiles.
For a short time, he designed tiles for fireplaces. Homer started painting with watercolors on a regular basis in during a summer stay in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
From the beginning, his technique was natural, fluid and confident, demonstrating his innate talent for a difficult medium. His impact would be revolutionary. Here, again, the critics were puzzled at first, "A child with an ink bottle could not have done worse.
But his watercolors proved popular and enduring, and sold more readily, improving his financial condition considerably. They varied from highly detailed Blackboard - to broadly impressionistic Schooner at Sunset - Some watercolors were made as preparatory sketches for oil paintings as for "Breezing Up" and some as finished works in themselves. Thereafter, he seldom traveled without paper, brushes and water based paints. As a result of disappointments with women or from some other emotional turmoil, Homer became reclusive in the late 's, no longer enjoying urban social life and living instead in Gloucester.
For a while, he even lived in a lighthouse on an island with the keeper's family. In re-establishing his love of the sea, Homer found a rich source of themes while closely observing the fishermen, the sea, and the marine weather. After , he rarely featured genteel women at leisure, focusing instead on working women. Homer spent two years - in the English coastal village of Cullercoats, Northumberland. Many of the paintings at Cullercoats took as their subjects working men and women and their daily heroism, imbued with a solidity and sobriety which was new to Homer's art, presaging the direction of his future work.
He wrote, "The women are the working bees. Stout hardy creatures. Cooper notes, "The need for isolation that had led Homer to spend over a year and a half in Cullercoats remained with him in America.
He found an appropriate environment in Prout's Neck, a rocky peninsula on the coast of Maine, ten miles south of Portland. In , the family invested in property, including Winslow who had intended to likewise summer at the property but upon the death of his mother the following year, took up permanent residence in a small cottage where he also set up his studio. The artist had visited the secluded region for nearly a decade before relocating to spend the rest of his life in Prout's Neck, where his closest relationships were his brother Charles, and his sister-in-law Mattie.
Homer bought the carriage house of the main house which belonged to his brother, where he built his artist studio with a view looking beyond the rocky cliffs to the sea. During this period, his most famous paintings might suggest a life of solitude and forebearance. However, Homer is known to have regularly traveled far from the frigid northern shores of Prout's Neck for the warmer climes of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Florida during the winter months, capturing the distinct aura of the tropical climate in a series of watercolor paintings and sketches.
However, upon return to his studio set above the rocky seaside cliffs, Homer would return to his relentless explorations of the sea. Winslow Homer is widely considered one of the foremost American painters of the nineteenth century. His work figured importantly in developing an American artistic sensibility at a time when European influences were the topic of much debate by artists and critics in the United States.
His resolute independence was a source of influence for those of his own time. As noted by art historian Matthew Baigell in A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture , "Homer and Eakins transformed genre painting and portraiture into strong statements of personal sensibility and in their late works discovered an America that impressionist pleasantries and American renaissance escapism entirely overlooked.
Conversely, Homer's visions of the sea served as inspiration for the transcendentalist painter Rockwell Kent who, like Henri and Bellows, travelled to the rocky coast of Maine to paint from the same terrain the inspired his hero. Kent's unpopulated landscapes, including wintry scenes of the Maine Coast, are noted for the formal qualities that tie his work to Homer.
In the words of J. Nilsen Laurvik, director of the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, Kent was "a worthy successor to the master of Prout's Neck, whos rugged, rock-ribbed coast he has depicted with forthright simplicity and directness that has something of the stark actuality and bitter tang of the sea itself. The influence of Winslow Homer continued into the 20 th century, particularly among artists who largely rejected the European inspired trends of abstraction and continued to pursue a distinctly American voice in their art.
Among the American Regionalists , the vision of Homer found greatest resonance with the realist paintings of Edward Hopper whose urban landscapes match the eerie silence of Homer's desolate seascapes. Somewhat surprising is Homer's influence on those artists who more readily identify with the influences of European abstraction in the early 20 th century such as Marsden Hartley.
Both Hopper and Hartley took multiple trips to the Maine coast, repeating the pilgrimage first taken by Henri and Bellows. But where the influence of Homer on the succeeding realists is overt, Hartley sought to fuse the two seemingly diverse approaches to create a modern regionalist style.
It is fitting that for an artist whose long career explored various media, from printmaking to watercolor to oil painting, that his influence would be equally diverse. Both Homer and Hopper began their career as illustrators, and Homer's direct approach also influenced the style of illustrators such as Howard Pyle and his student N. Wyeth who even named his studio "Eight Bells" after an eponymous painting by Homer. The admiration for the 19 th -century master passed to his children, perhaps most notably Andrew Wyeth who shared Homer's affinity for wintry landscapes.
Content compiled and written by Ximena Kilroe. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Molly Enholm. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Movements and Styles: American Realism. Overview and Artworks. He resided in New York City, making his living chiefly by designing magazine illustrations and building his reputation as a painter, but he found his subjects in the increasingly popular seaside resorts in Massachusetts and New Jersey, and in the Adirondacks, rural New York State, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Late in , motivated probably by the chance to see two of his Civil War paintings at the Exposition Universelle, Homer had begun a ten-month sojourn in Paris and the French countryside. While there is little likelihood of influence from members of the French avant-garde, Homer shared their subject interests, their fascination with serial imagery, and their desire to incorporate into their works outdoor light, flat and simple forms reinforced by their appreciation of Japanese design principles , and free brushwork.
Women at leisure and children at play or simply preoccupied by their own concerns were regular subjects for the artist in the s. In addition to expanding his mastery of oil paint during that decade, Homer began to create watercolors, and their success enabled him to give up his work as a freelance illustrator by He had been in Virginia during the war , and he returned there at least once during the mids, apparently to observe and portray what had happened to the lives of former slaves during the first decade of Emancipation.
In the early s, Homer came increasingly to desire solitude, and his art took on a new intensity. In , he traveled to England on his second and final trip abroad. After passing briefly through London, he settled in Cullercoats, a village near Tynemouth on the North Sea, remaining there from the spring of to November When the artist returned to New York, both he and his art were greatly changed.
Except for vacation trips to the Adirondacks, Canada, Florida, and the Caribbean, where he produced dazzling watercolors , Homer lived at Prouts Neck until his death. He enjoyed isolation and was inspired by privacy and silence to paint the great themes of his career: the struggle of people against the sea and the relationship of fragile, transient human life to the timelessness of nature. By about , however, Homer left narrative behind to concentrate on the beauty, force, and drama of the sea itself.
0コメント