Winslow Homer Art Prints

Born in Boston in 1836, he had his first lessons from his mother, a gifted amateur watercolourist. At 19 he was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer, turning out sheet-music covers, and afterwards said he never had a master again. Harper's Weekly sent him to sketch the Union army in the Civil War, and back in his New York studio those sketches became paintings such as Prisoners from the Front (1866). In it the Confederate prisoners lay down their rifles but refuse to bow.

The 1870s brought lighter subjects: children at play, farm life and young couples courting. Breezing Up shows a man and three boys in a catboat off Gloucester; infrared scans show he painted out a fourth boy and put an anchor in his place. He also painted Black Americans in Virginia without the stereotypes of the day, as in Dressing for the Carnival (1877).

Two years in the English fishing village of Cullercoats in 1881–82 made his work graver and more ambitious. From 1883 he lived at Prouts Neck, Maine, seventy-five feet from the ocean, and painted the sea scenes he is remembered for. In The Fog Warning, a lone fisherman with a dory holding several halibut looks over his shoulder at a fog bank that may cut him off from his ship. In Eight Bells, two sailors calmly take their bearings on deck, sure of their seamanship but wary of the sea. He repeated some of these subjects as etchings, and the Cleveland Museum of Art holds his 1884 etching of The Life Line.

Those pictures were often slow to sell; Undertow earned him only $400. Watercolour was steadier, and after 1873 he seldom travelled without his paints, to the Adirondacks, Florida and the Bahamas. He died in his Prouts Neck studio in 1910, with Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River still unfinished. He never took students, but his advice to other artists survives: "Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems."