Winslow Homer: An American Vision

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In this exciting new monograph, Professor Griffin provides fresh insight into the life and work of one of America's most-famous and best-loved artists. The author places Homer against a background of American nationalism fuelled by tensions between American self-identity and European sophistication. Finding in Homer's work the aspiration to create specifically American subjects and a specifically American character. It is testament to Homer's success that his influence is still echoed in every strand of America media almost 100 years after his death. Born in 1836, Homer began his career a magazine illustrator, soon becoming a regular contributor to Harper's Weekly, one of the America's most popular magazines. In the early 1860s, Homer was sent by his editor to the front lines of Civil War battles in Virginia. His woodcuts and lithographs of wartime encampments were widely distributed and served to make him highly popular with a large American audience. In the post war years Homer turned his attention to the American countryside and its people. It was during this period that he produced Snap the Whip, a piece thought by many Americans to be his best work. This and similar paintings were embraced by American critics as nationalist masterpieces, reaffirming precious American ideals and values that had been lost during the war. Griffin compares these contemporary feelings with later scholarship - which has suggested that Homer's works hold a deeper criticism of contemporary American life - to reassess Homer's aims and achievements during this period. In 1873, Homer began to paint using watercolours - the medium for which he is perhaps best known outside the USA - and in 1883 he moved to the New England fishing village of Prout's Neck, Maine. Here he began what was to become his best-known period of seascapes and nautical scenes. The overriding theme in much of his later work is the constant struggle between man and nature, a battle illustrated by the sailors in a stormy sea taking readings from a sextant in Eight Bells of 1886. In this new study however, Griffin expands this theme to discuss the often-overlooked idea that these works also react contemporary anxieties about loss of manhood control. Illustrating how the many all-male scenes - described by critics as 'strong meat for men'- affirm masculine authority and are charged with an underlying eroticism.

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Winslow Homer Watercolors

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The Watercolors of Winslow Homer

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Winslow Homer's watercolors rank among the greatest pictorial legacies of this country.

Winslow Homer's primary medium was oil painting, although to make ends meet, he did commercial illustration and chronicled the New York City social scene. Eventually, Homer withdrew from city life altogether to settle at Prout's Neck in New England. There he turned to watercolor, in part for financial reasons (they were easier to sell), but also because the newly popular medium enabled him to capture his impressions of scenery and landscapes encountered during his many travels with an immediacy and directness impossible in the more time-consuming oils.

The Watercolors of Winslow Homer offers a lively and beautifully illustrated survey of the artist's work in a medium he pursued with originality and consummate skill. Of his more than 700 watercolors, over 140 are reproduced here, dating from the 1870s to the turn of the century. Divided into ten thematic chapters chronicling Homer's life and artistic progress, the book begins with the delightful paintings he made of children in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and ends with works bathed in the humid atmosphere of the tropics. Along the way readers will discover Homer's unparalleled range of expression, from the somber works he painted along the stormy English coast to the poetic evocations of the Adirondacks forest.

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Winslow Homer and the Sea

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Winslow Homer (1836-1910) devoted much of his life to a study of the ocean and the people whose lives were intertwined with it. This book is the first to focus on the full range of Homer’s coastal subjects, with thirty-six reproductions of his most powerful works. Carl Little’s essay discusses Homer’s development as a painter; quotations from writers such as Homer scholar Philip C. Beam and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins add a further dimension to the thorough and enlightening text. Third printing.

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Winslow Homer (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists)

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Presents a biography of Winslow Homer

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Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation

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