Winslow Homer was a truly formidable artist. He was one of the foremost illustrators and genre painters of the nineteenth century. He was probably the best American watercolorist of his day.And he may well have been the greatest painter of marinescapes in history.He was an authentic American original. Although various of his paintings have been compared to those of Corot,Courbet, Manet and others, it is really almost impossible to mistake a Homer for the work of anyone else. In the words of a contemporary, the well-known art dealer J. Eastman Chase, "Homer was less influenced by others and what others had done than any artist-any man, I may as well say-I have ever known."

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 mistshrouded 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.

INTRODUCTION

CIVIL WAR AND GENRE

CULLERCOATS AND EARLY

SEA PAINTINGS 

THE TROPICS

THE ADIRONDACKS AND

CANADA

PROUT"S NECK AND THE EPIC

PAINTINGS

LIST OF COLOR PLATES