Winslow Homer

His mother Henrietta painted flowers in watercolour well enough to be taken seriously, and she taught him first. His father was another matter: a restless Boston hardware merchant who walked out of the business when the boy was 13 to chase the California gold rush, failed, and then left the family altogether to look for European capital for schemes that also came to nothing. At 19 Winslow was apprenticed to the commercial lithographer J. H. Bufford, grinding out sheet-music covers for two years, which he called a treadmill. He got out in 1857, turned down a staff job at Harper's Weekly, and said that from the time he took his nose off that lithographic stone he had no master and never would.

Harper's sent him to the Potomac in October 1861 to draw McClellan's camp, and the war made him a painter. Prisoners from the Front hung at the National Academy, which elected him a full Academician in 1865, at 29. He spent a year in Paris in 1867 and took no instruction, producing a dozen small canvases of peasant life closer to Millet than to anything new. Then Snap the Whip, Breezing Up, and from a Gloucester summer in 1873 the watercolours. Two years at Cullercoats in Northumberland from 1881 changed the work entirely, and critics said so at once. In 1883 he moved to Prouts Neck in Maine, 75 feet from the ocean, and painted Undertow, Eight Bells, The Fox Hunt, The Gulf Stream, and finally the rocks and the water with nobody in them at all.

The reviews were superb and the money was not. He quit illustration in 1875 and vowed to live on paintings alone, and his finances stayed precarious for another 25 years. Undertow earned him 400 dollars. The great sea pictures sat for years before anyone bought them, and he never had the sales that Salon subjects or a Sargent portrait commanded. He withdrew: Gloucester, then a stretch living in the Eastern Point lighthouse with the keeper's family, then Maine for good. The standard explanation is disappointment over a woman, which the record does not establish. What it does show is that he refused his first biographer any personal information, that his mother died in April 1884, and that he then kept house for a domineering father until 1898. He reached financial stability at about 64.

He died on September 29, 1910, at 74, in the Prouts Neck studio, leaving Shooting the Rapids unfinished, and went into Mount Auburn Cemetery. The argument outlived him in The Gulf Stream, first shown in 1900 to reviews including a Philadelphia critic calling it Smiling Sharks. Asked to explain the Black sailor and the circling fins, Homer wrote that he regretted painting a picture that required any description, that the boat and the sharks were matters of very little consequence, and that the ladies could be told the man would be rescued and live happily ever after. The National Academy jury petitioned, and the Metropolitan bought it in 1906. The Met built a show around him again in 2022.

Winslow Homer's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Prisoners from the Front artwork
  The Civil War picture that made his name, now at the Metropolitan Museum 1866
• Snap the Whip artwork
  Shown at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia 1872
• Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) artwork
  A father and three boys under sail, now at the National Gallery of Art 1876
• Eight Bells artwork
  Two sailors taking their bearings on deck 1886
• The Fox Hunt artwork
  His largest canvas and the first of his paintings bought by a major American museum 1893
• The Gulf Stream artwork
  Bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1906 after the Academy jury petitioned 1899

• 1849 aged ~13 His father gives up the hardware business for the California gold rush The venture failed and Charles Homer then left the family to look for capital in Europe.
• 1855 aged ~19 Apprenticed at 19 to the Boston lithographer J. H. Bufford
• October 1861 aged 25 Harper's Weekly sends him to draw McClellan's camp on the Potomac
• 1865 aged ~29 Elected a full Academician of the National Academy of Design at 29
• 1867 aged ~31 Spends a year in Paris without taking a single lesson
• 1881 aged ~45 Moves to the fishing village of Cullercoats in Northumberland for two years Critics said on his return that he was a very different Homer from the one they had known.
• 1883 aged ~47 Settles at Prouts Neck, Maine, 75 feet from the water
• 1906 aged ~70 The Metropolitan Museum of Art buys The Gulf Stream
• September 29, 1910 aged 74 Dies in his Prouts Neck studio at 74 Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River was left unfinished.

• Henry James 1843–1916
  Novelist whose intricate explorations of consciousness and society bridged American and European literature. detested his subjects and conceded he succeeded
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. presided over the war Homer was sent to draw
• Mary Cassatt 1844–1926
  Impressionist painter and printmaker who depicted the intimate bonds between mothers and children. the American who chose Paris where he chose Maine
• Thomas Eakins 1844–1916
  Realist painter celebrated for his anatomically precise portraits and scenes of athletes and surgeons. the other unsparing American realist
• Edward Hopper 1882–1967
  Realist painter whose depictions of urban isolation, like Nighthawks, became iconic American images. carried the solitude forward