WINSLOW HOMER
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Winslow Homer Biography
1836-1910

One of the most well known artists to come out of the Civil War, Homer was born in Boston, Mass. February 24, 1836. At 19, Homer was apprenticed to a local lithographer, and his drawings were soon appearing in the illustrated periodicals of the day.
In 1859 he moved to New York City to study at the National Academy of Design, supporting himself by contributing drawings to Harper's Weekly. In 1861 Harpers sent him to Washington to sketch Abraham Lincoln's inauguration.
Homers initial war drawings for Harpers depicted Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's army on the banks of the Potomac in Oct. 1861. The following year he was dispatched as a "special artist" to cover the Peninsula Campaign. Though he did not serve again as a special, he made frequent excursions to the battlefronts and filled his sketchbook with drawings, from which he worked in his studio in New York.

Double-page woodcuts of his illustrations depicting battles and camp scenes appeared in Harpers throughout the war years. Homer was not specifically a combat artist; his work was concerned with the intimate moments of camp life and human interest rather than with the panorama of clashing armies. Supplied with his firsthand observations made at the front, he translated these drawings into canvases such as Yankee Sharpshooter (1862).

Winslow Homer

In 1865 his painting Prisoners at the Front, depicting Brig. Gen. Francis C. Barlow questioning Confederate captives, was acclaimed by critics and immediately established his reputation as a painter of note.
After the war Homer contributed to Harpers illustrations dealing with a variety of subjects. He then devoted his talents exclusively to genre painting, becoming one of the foremost artists in America. He is famous for his Maine seascapes, woodland scenes in the Adirondacks and, in later years, watercolors of the Bahamas.

Also 1865 was elected a member of the NAD and was further distinguished by the exhibition of his Prisoners at the Front in the Paris Exposition of 1866. Homer went to Paris that year, but little is known of his activities during the ten months he spent abroad. Domestic travel for the next 15 years included trips to the White Mountains the summers of 1868 and 1869, the Adirondacks, and Gloucester, MA, in 1873.

It is significant that, when Homer returned to Europe in 1881, he did not go back to Paris, which was bursting with American art students at the ateliers, but chose, instead, the small fishing community of Tynemouth, on the cold gray northeast coast of England. Following his return home in 1882, Homer moved from his New York studio to the rugged coast of Prout's Neck, ME. For the remainder of his life this was his home, though he continued seasonal travels to Quebec and the Adirondacks in the summer months, and to Florida, Bermuda, and Nassau in the Bahamas in the winter. He exhibited almost annually at the Brooklyn Art Association, and the NAD, where he was elected an academician in 1865, and was a member of the Century Association from 1865 until his death.

He died at Prout's Neck, Maine, September 29, 1910.