Works by Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer began as a commercial illustrator and became a painter of the sea, of fishermen in small boats, storms and wrecks, in dense oils and in fluid, confident watercolours.

The Army of the Potomac--A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty is a page of Harper's Weekly from November 1862: a Union soldier sits high in a pine, eye to a telescopic sight, his canteen hung on a branch. Its caption says it was made from a painting by Homer, and like most of his early work it reached print as a wood engraving. Homer later remembered looking through a sharpshooter's rifle near Yorktown in April 1862, and said it felt close to murder. Prints are the largest group among the works below.

He began painting watercolours regularly during a summer at Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1873. In Boy with Anchor, from that summer, a boy in a straw hat leans on a rust-red anchor on a pebbly beach, the stones built up in thick gouache and the blue sky blotted while wet. He spent 1881–82 at Cullercoats on the English coast, returned to the United States late in 1882 and in 1883 moved to Prouts Neck, Maine, where he painted his big sea pictures of the mid-1880s. In The Herring Net, of 1885, one figure in a sou'wester hauls in a net glinting with herring and the other, perhaps a boy, empties it into the dory as the swell lifts it. The Gulf Stream, dated 1899 and reworked by 1906, leaves a lone Black sailor on the deck of a broken boat, with sharks around it and a waterspout at the right.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago. Portrait: Napoleon Sarony.