Winslow Homer

The greatest American Realist painter of the 19th century, and the artist who most fully captured the moral texture of American life in the decades following the Civil War. Homer began his career as a commercial illustrator, working for Harper's Weekly as a field correspondent during the Civil War — his images of camp life, soldiers and the aftermath of battle are among the most significant visual documents of the conflict. He was largely self-taught as a painter, taking brief lessons in oil but essentially learning by doing, and his early work retains a graphic directness that is entirely his own. After the Civil War he turned to subjects of childhood, summer leisure and country life — nostalgic scenes whose apparent innocence carries a quiet seriousness about mortality, solitude and the passing of things. A formative stay in a fishing village on the English coast at Cullercoats in 1881–82, where he drew and painted the women and fishermen with concentrated intensity, deepened his work and precipitated his move to permanent isolation at Prouts Neck, Maine, in 1883. From there he painted the sea — the North Atlantic specifically, in all its moods — with an austerity that matched the landscape. The sea paintings of the 1880s and 1890s are his acknowledged masterpieces: raw, structurally bold, almost frightening in their honesty about the indifference of water. He also made three trips to the tropics — the Bahamas, Cuba, Florida — and his watercolors from those journeys are universally regarded as the finest produced by any American painter. He lived alone at Prouts Neck, growing more reclusive as he aged, and died there in 1910 having never married. His reputation has never seriously declined.