With close analysis of Homer's art and of the personal challenges he faced throughout his life, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation is the most comprehensive study to date of the relationship between the artist's work and the psychological stages of his life. Elizabeth Johns uses theories advanced by Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson to look at Homer's evolution as a painter and a person within the context of the continuing dynamics of his family. Her incisive and absorbing readings of the artist's work take into account the developmental stages of young, middle, and late adulthood, analyzing what Homer painted at the various turning points in his life.
With this psychosocial approach, Johns examines the wood-engraved illustrations of Homer's early career in relationship to the values of his family; his images of the Civil War in the context of his young manhood; his paintings of the social scene and young women's place in it in connection with his own potential for marriage; his images of fisherwomen at Cullercoats and fishermen at Prout's Neck as they relate to his interior vision during middle age; and his intrigue with the sea in his late works as an identification with the larger processes of the universe. With more than seventy-five black-and-white illustrations and forty color plates of arresting images by this American master, Winslow Homer takes into account all available documentation, including the rich trove of the artist's correspondence at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and his entire body of work--illustrations for wood engravings, watercolors, and oils.

Author: Elizabeth Johns
Hardcover:  256 pages
Company: University of California Press  (2002-11-04)
ISBN: 0520227255
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In this exciting new monograph, Professor Griffin provides fresh insight into the life and work of one of America's most-famous and best-loved artists. The author places Homer against a background of American nationalism fuelled by tensions between American self-identity and European sophistication. Finding in Homer's work the aspiration to create specifically American subjects and a specifically American character. It is testament to Homer's success that his influence is still echoed in every strand of America media almost 100 years after his death. Born in 1836, Homer began his career a magazine illustrator, soon becoming a regular contributor to Harper's Weekly, one of the America's most popular magazines. In the early 1860s, Homer was sent by his editor to the front lines of Civil War battles in Virginia. His woodcuts and lithographs of wartime encampments were widely distributed and served to make him highly popular with a large American audience. In the post war years Homer turned his attention to the American countryside and its people. It was during this period that he produced Snap the Whip, a piece thought by many Americans to be his best work. This and similar paintings were embraced by American critics as nationalist masterpieces, reaffirming precious American ideals and values that had been lost during the war. Griffin compares these contemporary feelings with later scholarship - which has suggested that Homer's works hold a deeper criticism of contemporary American life - to reassess Homer's aims and achievements during this period. In 1873, Homer began to paint using watercolours - the medium for which he is perhaps best known outside the USA - and in 1883 he moved to the New England fishing village of Prout's Neck, Maine. Here he began what was to become his best-known period of seascapes and nautical scenes. The overriding theme in much of his later work is the constant struggle between man and nature, a battle illustrated by the sailors in a stormy sea taking readings from a sextant in Eight Bells of 1886. In this new study however, Griffin expands this theme to discuss the often-overlooked idea that these works also react contemporary anxieties about loss of manhood control. Illustrating how the many all-male scenes - described by critics as 'strong meat for men'- affirm masculine authority and are charged with an underlying eroticism.

Author: Randall C. Griffin
Hardcover:  240 pages
Company: Phaidon Press  (2006-07-01)
ISBN: 0714839922
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Author: Marc Simpson
Hardcover: 
Company: Publisher Unknown  (1988)
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During the years following the Civil War, many artists, including Homer, Church, and Moran, created images of America's scenic wonders and great landscape icons. These works, as well as decorative art objects, popular literature, photographs, and other ephemera helped to make the country's landscape a source of national pride and promoted landscape tourism.

FREDERIC CHURCH, WINSLOW HOMER, AND THOMAS MORAN: Tourism and the American Landscape is a major exhibition mounted by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum which will showcase, for the first time in more than two decades, the museum's extraordinary collection of more than 2000 paintings and drawings, which encompasses the largest grouping of Homer and Church objects in the world. Five original essays will accompany the 200 illustrations.

Author: Barbara Bloemink, Sarah Burns, Gail Davidson, Karal Ann Marling, Floramae McCarron-Cates
Hardcover:  192 pages
Company: Bulfinch  (2006-05-17)
ISBN: 0821257862
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Author: Patricia; Burns, Sarah Junker
Hardcover: 
Company:   (2003)
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Author: Helen A. Cooper
Paperback:  260 pages
Company: Yale University Press  (1987-09-10)
ISBN: 0300039972
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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.

Author: Miles Unger, Winslow Homer
Hardcover:  224 pages
Company: W. W. Norton & Company  (2001-09)
ISBN: 0393020479
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Winslow Homer (1836-1910) devoted much of his life to a study of the ocean and the people whose lives were intertwined with it. This book is the first to focus on the full range of Homer?s coastal subjects, with thirty-six reproductions of his most powerful works. Carl Little?s essay discusses Homer?s development as a painter; quotations from writers such as Homer scholar Philip C. Beam and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins add a further dimension to the thorough and enlightening text. Third printing.

Author: Carl Little
Paperback:  74 pages
Company: Pomegranate Communications  (1995-10)
ISBN: 0876544790
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Author: Barbara Gelman
Hardcover: 
Company: Crown Publishers  (1969)
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American painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910) created some of the most breathtaking and influential watercolours in the history of the medium. This handsome volume provides a comprehensive look at Homer's technical and artistic practice as a watercolourist, and at the experiences that shaped his remarkable development. Focusing on 25 rarely seen watercolours from the Art Institute's collection, along with 75 other related watercolours, gouaches, drawings, and paintings - including many of the artist's characteristic subjects - this book proposes a new understanding of Homer's techniques as they evolved over his career.Accessibly written essays consider each of the featured works in detail, examining the relationship between monochrome drawing and watercolour and the artist's lifelong interest in new optical and colour theories. In particular, they show how his sojourn in England, where he encountered leading British marine watercolourists and the dynamic avant-garde art scene, precipitated an abrupt change in technique and subject matter upon his return home. Conservators address the fragility of these watercolours, which are prone to fading due to light exposure, and demonstrate, through pioneering research on Homer's pigments and computer-assisted imaging, how the works have changed over time. Several of Homer's greatest watercolours are digitally 'restored', providing an exhilarating glimpse of the original impact of Homer's groundbreaking colour experiments.

Author: Martha Tedeschi, Kristi Dahm
Hardcover:  228 pages
Company: Art Institute of Chicago  (2008-02-26)
ISBN: 0300119453
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