Winslow Homer - Resources for Art Lovers

Winslow Homer - Biography 

Smithsonian Archives of American Art - The Winslow Homer Collection Online

This site provides access to the papers of painter Winslow Homer that were digitized in 2005 by the Archives of American Art. The papers have been scanned in their entirety, and total 196 images. VIEW COLLECTION

The Winslow Homer collection measures 0.2 linear feet and dates from 1877 to 1945. The collection documents Homer's career as a painter and lithographer through letters, printed material, family records, and photographs.

Winslow Homer Time Line

Welcome to the Winslow Homer Time Line, Showing you the important events in Winslow Homer's Life

Winslow Homer - Biography

Welcome to the Winslow Homer Historical Preservation Site, Presenting the Winslow Homer Biography, and an extensive online collection of his art for for your perussal and enjoyment.

Biography

Winslow Homer is regarded as one of America's foremost artists, and this web site has been established to provide as much information as possible for anyone interested in the artist.

Winslow Homer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 - September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects.

Articles

Winslow Homer is regarded as one of America%uFFFDs foremost artists, and this web site has been established to provide as much information as possible for anyone interested in the artist.

Articles about Winslow Homer

Archive Sources

Winslow Homer - Archive Sources

NGA Washington - Winslow Homer - Biography

Winslow Homer
American, 1836 - 1910Winslow Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1836, the second of the three children, all sons, of Henrietta Benson and Charles Savage Homer.

Winslow Homer in Art Galleries and Museums 

NGA | Winslow Homer

From the late 1850s until his death in 1910, Winslow Homer produced a body of work distinguished by its thoughtful expression and its independence from artistic conventions. A man of multiple talents, Homer excelled equally in the arts of illustration, oil painting, and watercolor. Many of his works-depictions of children at play and in school, of farm girls attending to their work, hunters and their prey-have become classic images of nineteenth-century American life. Others speak to more universal themes such as the primal relationship of man to nature.

NGA - Winslow Homer Watercolors: A Survey of Themes and Styles

Winslow Homer Watercolors - A Survey of Themes and Styles

The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Search Results

works by Winslow Homer

Fine Art Museums of San Francisco

works by Winslow Homer

Art Institute of Chicago

works by Winslow Homer

Detroit Institute of Arts

works by Winslow Homer

Shelburne Museum | American Paintings

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) - Milking, About 1875 - Oil on canvas

Brooklyn Museum: Winslow Homer

Collections: Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer - Exhibitions 

Art Institute of Chicago - Winslow Homer (2008) Behind the Scenes

Take an in-depth and detailed look at Winslow Homer's tools, techniques, and watercolors through the eyes of curators, researchers, conservators, and conservation scientists.

National Gallery of Art - Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art

Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art
More than fifty paintings, drawings, prints, and watercolors in the Gallery's Homer collection were on view at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Mezzanine, from July 3, 2005 - February 26, 2006.

Introductory page - with links to web feature, brochure, specific paintings and biography

NGA | Winslow Homer | introduction

[Introduction to web feature relating to a 2005 Winslow Homer exhibition at the NGA Washington]From the late 1850s until his death in 1910, Winslow Homer produced a body of work distinguished by its thoughtful expression and its independence from artistic conventions. A man of multiple talents, Homer excelled equally in the arts of illustration, oil painting, and watercolor. Many of his works-depictions of children at play and in school, of farm girls attending to their work, hunters and their prey-have become classic images of nineteenth-century American life. Others speak to more universal themes such as the primal relationship of man to nature.

Highlighting a wide and representative range of Homer's art, this Web feature traces his extraordinary career from the battlefields, farmland, and coastal villages of America, to the North Sea fishing village of Cullercoats, the rocky coast of Maine, the Adirondacks, and the Caribbean, offering viewers the opportunity to experience and appreciate the breadth of his remarkable artistic achievement.

NGA | Winslow Homer | chronology 01

This section provides several chronologies related to the artist's life and work, in addition to an accession history highlighting donations of works by Homer to the National Gallery of Art, a PDF checklist of works in the exhibition Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art, and suggested resources for further study.

Includes Visual chronology of works by year

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Exhibition - Winslow Homer: American Scenes

Winslow Homer: American Scenes
Friday, June 20, 2008 - Sunday, January 4, 2009
Selections from the Museum's rich collection of works by Winslow Homer (1836-1910) are on view in the Lee Gallery, just inside the newly opened State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance. From a childhood drawing through his late seascapes in oil, the exhibition includes designs for illustrations from popular periodicals like Harper's Weekly, paintings, watercolors, and rarely seen etchings. Among the themes featured are images from the Civil War, paintings of childhood and leisure from the 1870s, and seascapes from the 1880s until just before Homer's death in 1910. "Winslow Homer: American Scenes" offers an extraordinary glimpse at the artist's working method in a variety of media and for a variety of audiences throughout his career.

New York Times - Portraits of a Simpler, Gentler Time

Homer graduated from workaday illustrator to great American painter. But along the way he made hundreds of illustrations for magazines like Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly, capturing a variety of subjects reflecting 19th-century America. Around 100 of them are showing at the Nassau County Museum of Art in an exhibition called "Winslow Homer: Illustrating America," organized by the Brooklyn Museum from its collection. It is a fine show.

Most of the works are wood engravings, the primary medium for newspaper, book and magazine illustration throughout the second half of the 19th century.

Brooklyn Museum: Winslow Homer: Illustrating America

Exhibitions: Winslow Homer: Illustrating America

Art Institute of Chicago - Winslow Homer Watercolours 

Links from the exhibition

Winslow Homer - a self-taught artist

Homer's self-education and early work in black and white directly impacted his later practice in watercolor. As an illustrator, he developed a sophisticated understanding of light and dark values, learning to manipulate the shades between black and white to convincingly suggest color and light. He had little respect for traditional rules that governed oil painting and ultimately found watercolor liberating.

Winslow Homer - early watercolors

Winslow Homer began his career as a serious watercolorist abruptly in the summer of 1873.

Remaining true to his self-taught, trial-and-error methodology, Homer began experimenting in watercolor. He had few preconceived notions of how watercolor should be used and often painted quickly in the open air, referring to his watercolors as sketches. At other times, he developed watercolors from careful pencil studies. He taught himself by reading treatises on the medium-even his first Gloucester pictures show a familiarity with the wide range of techniques that were advocated by handbooks, largely derived from English watercolor practice.

Winslow Home - watercolours in England

Homer set sail for England on the Cunard liner SS Parthia on March 15, 1881. He arrived in Liverpool, continued to London, then traveled north. By the summer of 1881, the artist had made his way to Cullercoats, a small fishing village on the northeast coast of England, not far from the Scottish border. There he rented a cottage with a walled garden and a studio overlooking the harbor.

Homer's 20-month sojourn in England in 1881/82 marked a turning point in his work and career. His trip was the logical culmination of a long period of studying both watercolor practice and color theory.

Winslow Homer - Prout's Neck

Homer moved to Maine during the summer of 1883, settling on Prout's Neck, a rocky peninsula near Portland with views of Saco Bay and the Atlantic. There his brother Charles built the Ark, a large house at which the entire family could gather in the summers. The following year, Homer had the carriage house converted into a studio; a painting porch was constructed to provide him with an open-air workspace and uninterrupted views of the sea. Completed during the summer of 1884, this studio became the artist's permanent home.

Winslow Homer - The Adirondacks

Watercolor was particularly suited to rustic exploration, and the artist painted more than one hundred Adirondacks subjects in the medium. The themes of these works reflect his personal and artistic interests: fishing, hunting, weather, sunrise and sunset, and light on water.

Winslow Homer - The Tropics

Throughout his trips around the Caribbean, the artist simultaneously indulged his love of fishing and his engagement with watercolor. Each change of scene offered fresh subject matter and yet another opportunity to push the flexible medium in new directions as he applied his increasingly sophisticated understanding of color and light to a new set of atmospheric conditions.

Resources

Lots and lots and lots of technical data and detail and photos and videos relating to a technical analysis of Winslow Homer's materials and watercolor practices.

Behind the Scenes - of the AIC Winslow Homer exhibition

The Art Institute of Chicago is fortunate to house among its collections of American Art twenty-five watercolors and three monochrome drawings by Winslow Homer. Between 2005 and 2007, curators, researchers, conservators and conservation scientists at the Art Institute of Chicago collaborated on an in-depth study of these works using a variety of new analytical technologies. Looking closely at this corpus of works, and at watercolors on loan to the museum by the Terra Foundation for American Art and local private collections, this team set out to learn about Homer's use of his watercolor materials in order to better understand his artistic intentions, his interest in optics and color theory, and his lifelong study of the effects of light in nature.

Background to Winslow Homer's watercolor practices

Even in his own day, Winslow Homer was celebrated as "America's Master in Watercolor." His technical virtuosity in this challenging medium, and his intuitive understanding of the artistic possibilities it offers, have influenced generations of artists since then. His example also encouraged the growing appreciation of watercolor as a serious independent art form beginning in his lifetime. The fresh, spontaneous, light-filled effects associated with watercolor indeed helped to shape an authentic identity for American Art.

About the research behind the scenes

Research on Winslow Homer's watercolors at the Art Institute was carried out by the following interdisciplinary team: Martha Tedeschi, Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings; Kristi Dahm, Assistant Conservator of Prints and Drawings; Karen Huang, Research and Exhibition Assistant; Francesca Casadio, Conservation Scientist; and Judith Walsh, guest author, Associate Professor, Paper Conservation, Buffalo State, SUNY.

Tools and Techniques of Winslow Homer

Palettes, brushes, sketchblocks and techniques

Watch video clips about watercolor technique. Selections include artist demonstrations of specific watercolor techniques and explanations about specific pictures

Locations where Winslow homer painted - matched to specific works

Using Terrametrics

Selected works by Winslow Homer

Each work is linked to aspects of the exhibition or of the research. The analysis of each makes for interesting reading.

Winslow Homer - Online galleries and websites 

Winslow Homer Online

Winslow Homer [American Painter, 1836-1910] Guide to pictures of works by Winslow Homer in art museum sites and image archives worldwide.

Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer images and biography