Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer is considered among the greatest american artists of the nineteenth century. This book examines the immensity of Homer’s artistic accomplishments, focusing not only on his masterpieces in various media but also on the suites of works on the same subject that reflect the artist’s essentially modern practices of thinking and working serially and thematically.
Homer’s paintings of camp life at the front during the Civil War are the best we have, His subsequent paintings of Americans at play, of tropical landscapes and of Adirondack and Canadian wildernesses were so incomparably fresh and vital as to gain him international reputation. But it was not until the beginning of the 1880s, when he was 45 and sojourning in england, that he first began to be drawn to the subject that would become both his obsession and his glory, the sea. He would spend the rest of his life almost as a recluse in his isolated studio on the Maine coast, painting the ocean in all its lights and moods, from moments of dark, terrifying violence to others of almost mystical mist-shrouded calm. The result is a legacy of sea paintings of such power as to be unique in all art.
In this handsome volume author Kate
Jennings provides an insightful introduction to both the life and the works of this towering American genius and gives us a cornucopia of breathtaking color reproductions of his greatest masterworks.