Winslow Homer
1780-1849
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading Post-Impressionist artist. He was best known as a painter and his bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art. Expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.
Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, most famous for his marine subjects. Largely self-taught, he is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America, and a preeminent figure in American art.
Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was apprenticed to a Boston commercial lithographer at the age of 19. By 1857 his freelance illustration career was underway and he contributed to magazines such as Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly. His early works, mostly commercial engravings, are characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, and dramatic contrast of light and dark, and lively figure groupings- qualities that remained important throughout his career.
In 1859 he opened a studio in New York City, and began his painting career. Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), where he sketched battle scenes and mundane camp life. Although the drawings did not get much attention at the time, they mark Homer's transition from illustrator to painter.
After exhibiting at the National Academy of Design, Homer traveled to Paris, France in 1867 where he remained for a year. He practiced landscape painting while continuing to work for Harper's. Though his interest in depicting natural light parallels that of the impressionists, there is no evidence of direct influence.
Throughout the 1870s he painted mostly rural or idyllic scenes of farm life, children playing, and young adults courting. Homer gained acclaim as a painter in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Homer was a member of the The Tile Club, a group of artists and writers who met frequently to exchange ideas and organize outings for painting.
In the English coastal village of Cullercoats, Northumberland, he rekindled his boyhood interest in the sea, and painted the local fisher folk. Many of the paintings at Cullercoats took as their subject young women mending nets or looking out to sea; they are imbued with a solidity, sobriety, and earthy heroism which was new to Homer's art, and they presage the direction of his future work.
Back in the U.S., he painted the seascapes for which he is best known. Although Homer never taught, these works strongly influenced succeeding generations of American painters for their direct and energetic interpretation of man's stoic relationship to an often neutral and sometimes harsh wilderness.
In the winter Homer ventured to warmer locations in Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas. It was on these fishing vacations that he experimented freely with the watercolor medium, producing works by using his singular vision and manner of painting to create a body of work that has not been matched."
Homer died at the age of 74 in his Prout's Neck studio.
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