Winslow Homer Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836 and growing up in Cambridge, Winslow Homer became one of the all-time leading figures in American art, known for his marine genre paintings and for his espousing of realism, especially of American life. From the 1880s until his death in 1910, his work was focused on issues of mortality and the forces of nature such as violent storms at sea. Between 1884 and 1889, he did numerous etchings of his own paintings and watercolors. Homer had no formal artistic training until he was apprenticed to a lithographer, J.H. Bufford, but Homer disliked this work and got work as an illustrator for "Ballou's Pictorial." From 1859 to 1883, he worked in New York as a Civil War illustrator for "Harper's Weekly" and studied at the National Academy of Design where Frederick Rondel was a major influence. However, during the early years of his career, illustration was his "bread and butter." He traveled and studied in Europe for several years including France from 1866 to 1867, where he shared a studio in Montmartre with fellow artist Albert Warren Kelsey. Several small paintings are extant from that period as are the three illustrations for "Harper's Weekly" that had helped to finance his trip. He returned to New York and settled for thirteen years in New York where his studio proximity to that of Eastman Johnson, genre painter, was a major influence. Many of Homer's early New York paintings were of leisurely figures in landscape, reflecting his time in France influenced by the Impressionists. For much of his residency in New York, he lived and worked in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building, and became increasingly exploring in his subject matter--rural life, childhood remembrances including summers at Lake George, Saratoga Springs, and the Adirondack Mountains. One of his most famous paintings, "Snap the Whip" from 1872, owes much to French plein-air painting and to the genre style of William Sidney Mount. In 1873, he began working in watercolor, and many of his most acclaimed works are in that medium. From 1881 to 1882, he was in England near Tynemounth on the rugged coast of the North Sea at the small fishing village of Cullercoats, and he began doing scenes, harsher in tone, of figures struggling heroically in landscape. There he worked almost exclusively in watercolor. Settling permanently in the seclusion of Prout's Neck, a remote area on the coast of Maine, he strove not only for solitude but for the closest approximation he could find in the United States to that same English coast. At Prout's Neck, he was able to indulge his love of the outdoors, his fascination with the moods of the weather and the people in the landscape. He traveled all over for seascapes, boating, and sporting scenes and also made several trips to Caribbean Sea locations where he did a number of marine scenes ominous in tone. Homer never married and in his most productive years lived a highly secluded life, seemingly content according to his letters and family accounts. on an engraved illustration by Richard Westall, English academician. His studio was in Newtown, Pennsylvania in Bucks County, and two of his students were landscape painter Martin Johnson Heade and portraitist Thomas Hicks. In October 1999 to January 2000, the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a retrospective of his work, examining his secular canvases compared to his religiously inspired paintings.

Biography with permission from AskArt.com

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