Winslow Homer
1836 – 1910
From the Civil War front to the Maine surf - the art of Winslow Homer
About Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 24, 1836, the second of three sons of Charles Savage Homer, a businessman given to restless ventures, and Henrietta Maria Benson Homer, an accomplished amateur watercolourist who became his first teacher. Watercolour, the medium his mother practised at home, would decades later become the vehicle for some of his most original work.
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Notable Works
The Gulf Stream
Painted after a winter in Nassau, this canvas shows a lone sailor on a dismasted boat, surrounded by circling sharks with a waterspout rising behind him. Homer added the distant ship on the horizon…
Browse the collection →Snap the Whip
Schoolboys play crack-the-whip in a meadow beside a small red schoolhouse, a chain of bodies on the point of breaking apart. Homer painted two nearly identical versions in 1872; the Met's omits the…
Browse the collection →Prisoners from the Front
A small group of Confederate prisoners faces the Union general Francis Channing Barlow across a ravaged field. Exhibited at the National Academy of Design and then at the 1867 Exposition Universelle…
Browse the collection →Timeline
Born February 24 in Boston, Massachusetts, the second of three sons of Charles Savage Homer and Henrietta Maria Benson Homer
Apprenticed at nineteen to the Boston commercial lithographer J. H. Bufford
Sets up as a freelance illustrator, contributing to Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly; declines a staff post at Harper's
Moves to New York; attends classes at the National Academy of Design and studies briefly with Frederick Rondel
Sent to the Civil War front by Harper's Weekly; draws his first war sketches in McClellan's camp on the Potomac in October
"From the time I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master, and never shall have any."
— Winslow Homer