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The Gulf Stream
Winslow Homer
- Homer painted Guld Stream when he was 63, the year after the death of his father
- Homer began to feel weak and vulnerable, which is portrayed in the painting
- Homer's visit to Nassau and Florida probably triggered the creation of the painting
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Snap the Whip I
Winslow Homer |
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The Sharpshooter on Picket Duty
Winslow Homer
- Homer shows a solitary figure who, using new rifle technology, is able to fire from a distance and remain unseen by his target.
- The subject of this engraving is based on Homer's first oil painting
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A Summer Night
Winslow Homer
- A Summer Night initally evoked a mixed resonse
- In 1900 Homer sent A Summer Night , Maine Coast, Fox Hunt, to Exposition Universelle in Paris, where it received a gold medal
- Among those who reportedly saw and admired A summer Night at the Luxembourg was the impressionist Claude Monet.
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A Brook Trout
Winslow Homer |
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The Turkey Buzzard
Winslow Homer |
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Undertow
Winslow Homer
- “Undertow” is based on a real life rescue that Homer witnessed on a visit to Atlantic City in 1883
- He choose to do a freizelike formation to create a more dramatic effect
- The painting was first shown at the National Academy in 1887
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Observations on Shipboard
Winslow Homer |
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Breezing Up (or A Fair Wind)
Winslow Homer
- Breezing Up was Homer's most popular painting since Prisoner's of the Front
- Homer began the canvas in New York in 1873, after he had visited Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he first worked in watercolor
- The finished work indicates that the significant influence of Japanese art on Western painters in the 19th century
- Today, Breezing Up is considered an iconic American painting, and among Homer's finest
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Blackboard
Winslow Homer
- For a short period in the 1870's, a decorative quality became evident in Homer's art
- The marks on the blackboard puzzled scholars for many years.
- Rather than being a polite accomplishment, drawing was viewed as having practical application, playing a valuable roll in industrial design
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Haymaking
Winslow Homer
- The wet drapery clinging to the woman's solid form, the anonymity of the rescuer, whose face has been obscured by the scarf as wind and waves swirl about them, all help to convey the sense of physical and emotional exhaustion and the protagonist's heroic effort to triumph over nature's fury.
- The Life Line was an immediate success, but Homer's work held little commercial appeal.
- one critic remarked that his paintings had a "rude vigor and grim force that is almost a tonic in the midst of the namby-pambyism of many of the other pictures on display."
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The Fog Warning
Winslow Homer
- Initially, the painting was called Halibut Fishing
- The painting represent the constant danger for fisherman during all of the seasons of the year
- Ships could easily become enveloped in the fog before reaching saftey.
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The Berry Pickers
Winslow Homer |
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The Veteran in a New Field
Winslow Homer |
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Sunset at Gloucester
Winslow Homer
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Sunset Fires
Winslow Homer
- Sunset Fires is one of the most frequently requested paintings in the museum's collection for loan to other museums for exhibition and as such it has traveled extensively
- A brilliant watercolorist, who was ahead of his time in this technique, Homer captures in just a few strokes and a few colors, a sailboat caught in the fiery sunset off the coast of Gloucester
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On the Beach, Long Branch, New Jersey
Winslow Homer |
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Winter Coast
Winslow Homer
- Homer increasingly emphasized the sublime beauty and power of the environment
- Instead of heroic narratives, his later Maine seascapes focused on man's often grim struggle to survive
- While the hunter in this image has successfully snared a wild goose, he remains dwarfed by his surroundings, standing alone against the unrelenting Atlantic Ocean
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North Road, Bermuda
Winslow Homer
- Homer first visited the Caribbean in 1885, and returned to Bermuda or the Bahamas almost every year after 1890
- The bright sunshine and saturated colors of the region inspired new possibilities for the artist's work and led him specifically to watercolor painting
- The fluidity and luminosity of the medium were especially well suited for capturing brilliant atmospheric effects. In "North Road, Bermuda," these are conveyed by the loose, wet handling of paint and the dramatic composition, which includes both a lush view of the immediate foreground and an open, seemingly endless vista
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Shore at Bermuda
Winslow Homer |
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Redwing Blackbirds
Winslow Homer |
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Lost on the Grand Banks
Winslow Homer
- Bill Gates paid more than $30 million to John Spoor Broome, a business man from Southern California, for "Lost on the Grand Banks," the last major seascape by Winslow Homer still in private hands
- Winslow Homer shows in his "Lost on the Great Banks" a rude vigor and firm force that is almost a tonic in the midst of the namby-pambyism of many of his other pictures
- The utter simplicity of the composition, the fidelity to local coloring, and spirited rendering of the wave tossed boat and its anxious occupants-these are elements characteristic of Mr. Homer's work, but always welcome because Mr. Homer always has something to say."
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Girls Strolling in an Orchard
Winslow Homer |
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Sponge Fishing
Winslow Homer
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Natural Bridge, Bermuda
Winslow Homer
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Sloop, Nassau
Winslow Homer |
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The Herring Net
Winslow Homer
- In 1883, Winslow Homer moved to Prout's Neck, Maine, and proceeded to create a series of images of the sea unparalleled in American art
- he made a trip to a fishing community in Tynemouth, England, that fundamentally changed his work and life
- Homer depicted the heroic efforts of fishermen at their daily work, hauling in an abundant catch of herring. In a small dory
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The Life Line
Winslow Homer |
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Snap the Whip
Winslow Homer |
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The Blue Boat
Winslow Homer |
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A Good Shot, Adirondacks
Winslow Homer
- There is a thematic trend in Homer’s deer hunting series; his subjects shift over time from the start of the hunt to the kill
- In A Good Shot, Adirondacks, we are in the presence of death.
- Removed spatially and emotionally from the hunter, we focus on the prey.
- Homer’s only watercolor to show a deer being killed, this work captures the moment the stag is shot, just as he climbs to the top of a rock in a river of rushing water
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The Initials
Winslow Homer
- the Initials is an example of how many more are less known and seldom discussed yet are important and deserve attention
- The Initials shows a solitary young woman in a barren wood of pine trees with dead lower branches
- The Initials tells only obliquely of the American Civil War, although painted in the midst of that conflict
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The Coming Storm
Winslow Homer
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Boys in a Pasture
Winslow Homer |
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Harvest Scene
Winslow Homer |
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The Bathers
Winslow Homer |
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A Tropical Breeze, Nassau
Winslow Homer |
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Houses on a Hill
Winslow Homer |
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The Cotton Pickers
Winslow Homer
- He revisited the South in the mid-1870's to witness the change, or rather the absence of it, that Reconstruction had brought to the lives of former slaves.
- The result was a work like "The Cotton Pickers." Stately, silent and with barely a flicker of sadness on their faces, the two black women in the painting are unmistakable in their disillusionment: they picked cotton before the war and they are still picking cotton afterward.
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Sponge Fishing, Nassau
Winslow Homer
- The painting is part of the Hayden Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- the boys in this painting—companionable, idle, at peace—may be seen as emblems of America's nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time as well as of its hope for the future
- Their faces are averted, a device Homer often used to make his figures less individual and, therefore, more universal.
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The Trapper, Adirondacks
Winslow Homer
- Homer painted Adirondack subjects intermitttenly thgouhout four decades.
- One of his achievements in Adirondacks was to revitalize an older American subject-the woods man-and bring it from a status of peripheral interest in the world of art to center stage
- It established him as an independent voice among both those who painted this northerly wilderness and those who portrayed the men who worked in it
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A Garden in Nassau
Winslow Homer
- During Homer’s first visit to the Bahamas in the winter of 1884-85, he painted more than 30 watercolors
- A Garden in Nassau depicts a young boy standing outside a coral limestone wall that surrounds an unseen home
- the watercolor originally included two older boys perched atop the wall to the left of the wooden gate; they were attempting to reach the clustered coconuts on the other side. In this original composition, the small child standing in the path may have been stationed as a lookout for the two older children
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A Wall, Nassau
Winslow Homer
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