The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 84

Winslow Homer
American, 1836–1910
One of America’s greatest painters, Winslow Homer was born in
Boston and raised in the then-rural town of Cambridge. There,
he explored an interest in art and nature through the encourage-
ment of his parents, especially his mother, an amateur watercol-
orist. At age nineteen, with the aid of his father, Homer received
an apprenticeship at the firm of John H. Bufford, a commercial
lithographer in Boston. After two years of what Homer referred
to as “slavery,” he became a freelance illustrator, working for such
publications as Ballou’s Pictorial, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspa-
per, and Harper’s Weekly. Shortly after moving to New York City
in 1859, Harper’s sent Homer to Washington, D.C., to illustrate
Lincoln’s presidential inauguration and then, following the start
of the Civil War, to the front lines as an artist-correspondent. He
was determined, however, to become a painter; he enrolled in eve-
ning classes at the National Academy of Design and took several
lessons from the French artist Frédéric Rondel.
tration. As a professional painter, his output in the 1870s focused Napoleon Sarony (American, b. Canada, 1821–1896),
Winslow Homer taken in N.Y., 1880, albumen print, 5 7/8 in. x
4 1/4 in., Bowdoin College Museum of Art, gift of the Homer
Family, 1964.69.179.5
and African Americans. In the following decade, he traveled to the REFERENCES:
By 1875, Homer shifted away from a career in commercial illus-
on scenes of children playing in the countryside, women of leisure,
English coast, spending over a year in Cullercoats near Tynemouth.
His subjects became the brave fishermen of the town and their
wives, while his marine paintings depicted both the pleasantries and
perils of the sea. He returned to New York in 1882, yet took up per-
manent residence in Prouts Neck, Maine, the following year. Until
the early 1900s, Homer made frequent trips to the Adirondacks,
Canada, the Caribbean, and Florida. It wa s in his New England
studio, however, that he created some of his most quintessential
works including The Life Line, Eight Bells, and The Gulf Stream.
Following his death in 1910, Outlook magazine proclaimed: “In the
death of Winslow Homer America loses one of her most original,
powerful, and gifted painters” (“Winslow Homer,” 338).
78 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting
Dearinger, David Bernard, ed. Paintings and Sculpture in the
Collection of the National Academy of Design. Volume 1,
1826–1925. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2004.
Downes, William Howe. The Life and Works of Winslow Homer.
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911.
Irwin, Grace. Trail-Blazers of American Art. New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1930.
Jennings, Kate F. Winslow Homer. New York: Crescent Books,
1990.
Mather Jr., Frank Jewett. Estimates in Art. Series II. Sixteen Es-
says on American Painters of the Nineteenth Century. Freeport,
NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.