Brian Sewell Art Directory
Winslow Homer

The Watercolors of Winslow Homer
Miles Unger

Winslow Homer's first medium was oil painting, although to make ends meet, he did commercial illustration and chronicled the New York City social scene. Eventually, Homer withdrew from city life altogether to settle at Prout's Neck on the rocky New England coast. There he turned to watercolour, in part for financial reasons (watercolours were easier to sell), but the newly popular medium also enabled him to capture his impressions of scenery and landscapes encountered during his many travels with an immediacy and directness impossible in the more time-consuming oils. Of his more than 700 watercolours, over 140 are reproduced here, dating from the 1870s to the turn of the century and ranging from pastoral to narrative, dramatic to serene. Miles Unger's text provides insight into the artist's technical mastery of the medium and discusses the importance of Homer's watercolours within the larger body of his work.

Winslow Homer Watercolours
by Helen A. Cooper

Traces the development of Homer as a watercolorist, shows a selection of his landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, and discusses his distinctive style and techniques.

Winslow Homer and the Sea
by Carl Little

Fine color reproduction (in a 10x8" format) of 33 paintings. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Winslow Homer
Nicolai Cikovsky, Franklin Kelly, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr, Judith E. Walsh, Charles Brock

This work examines Homer's artistic accomplishments. It focuses not only on his use of various media, but also on the suites of works on the same subject that reflect the artist's modern practice of thinking and working serially and thematically.

Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s
Margaret C. Conrads

Winslow Homer's luminous watercolor seascapes and highly spirited portraits of children and outdoorsmen are some of the most recognizable and cherished works in the history of American art. This catalogue, published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition, examines his pictures from the 1870s, the least-studied period of this perennially popular American artist. Debunking the common myth that Homer worked in isolation, Margaret Conrads reveals him as a controversial artist who was an integral part of the dizzying New York art scene of the 1870s. Indeed, Homer was the American artist most frequently discussed by the press at this time--often with simultaneous commendation and vilification.

By viewing Homer's works of the 1870s through the lens of contemporaneous criticism, the author explains how and why the painter embodied the critics' high hopes for an art that expressed national values. She finds reflected in his vivid images an ongoing struggle to meet these expectations, even as he challenged and helped to redefine the artistic conventions governing American aesthetics.

With almost one hundred full-color plates and nearly sixty black-and-white illustrations, this handsome volume is a remarkable record of an important period not only in Winslow Homer's career but also in the fascinating art world of late-nineteenth-century America.