Winslow Homer Watercolors

Quick Navigation Winslow Homer watercolor palette Winslow Homer Biography Winslow Homer Paintings

Winslow Homer Watercolors are painterly made, with only a few brush strokes.

No obessession for realism or photographic tricks to capture reality in its whole, but a rendering of the atmosphere and light with only a few, simple and -only apparently - causal touches, leaving color and water act on the paper for stunning emotions..

 

The beginning...1873

A basket of clams, 1873. The year Homer took up watercolors.

Boys and Kitten, 1873

Boy in a boatyard, 1873

Girls with a lobster, 1873

The Berry Pickers, 1873

The farm yard, 1873

Houghton Farm

The Summer of 1878...Houghton Farm, Orange County, New York State. Homer and his brother Charles were invited by his boyhood friend Valentine Wilson (now become a successful businessman) to spend the Summer there.

The area is in the catskills mountains, the legendary area of flyfishing...

Maps, then and now...

1935 map...(Homer died in 1910)

Our days...

sources:

Auction Galleries

Blue Lantern Blog (on the exhibition Winslow Homer’s New York State: Houghton Farm And Beyond, Agust-October 2009, Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse University, New York, organized by David Tatham, Syracuse University professor emeritus of fine arts - his books on Homers: Winslow Homer in the Adirondacks, Winslow Homer and the Pictorial Press )

 

Shady spot, 1878

 

Girl on a garden seat, 1878

 

Girl in a garden, 1878

 

Towing the boat, 1878

 

 

Weary, 1878

Shepardesses resting, 1878

 

On the stile, 1878

 

Houghton Farm, 1878.

Cow in pasture, 1878

The milk maid, 1878

Boy and girl on a hillside, 1878

In the fresh air, 1878

Mountainville, 1878

The sea

Graphite and opaque white watercolor, with traces of black chalk, on medium weight, slightly-textured, tan laid paper with blue and red fibers
462 x 618 mm

 

Rustic...on Houghton Farm, 1878

Farmer's boy, 1887
Transparent and opaque watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, heightened with gum glaze, over graphite, on thick, rough-textured ivory wove paper
355 x 509 mm

The Adirondacks, 1870s..and later years

Recommeded book: Winslow Homer in the Adirondacks

Watercolor, with rewetting, blotting and scraping, over graphite, on thick, moderately textured, ivory wove paper
380 x 545 mm

A Good Shot, Adirondacks, 1892

 

On the Trail, c. 1892

After the Hunt, 1848

The Bahamas, Florida and Cuba

Homer is also famous for his marines of the Bahamas

The water fan, 1898-9
The exhibition online catalogue says that "Homer depicted light shimmering on the ocean using watercolor paper with a heavy twill texture in The Water Fan. The diagonal pattern of the sheet, which runs from top right to lower left, was imparted during manufacture by the papermaker’s woven wire screen that supported the paper pulp during sheet formation. The opposite side is relatively smooth. "

 

 

Stowing sail, 1903

 

After the Hurricane, Bahamas, 1899

 

 

Fishing Boats, Key West, 1903

The online catalogue, rightly point ous the rapid application of wet on wet, the "judicious sponging of wet pigment, especially in the sadow", the many pencil marks (e.g. for the rigging).

 

 

Banana Tree-Nassau, 1885, watercolor on paper, 14 3/8 x 13 3/8 inches

 

Hurricane

 

Bermuda, 1901, watercolor and graphite on paper, 14 x 21 inches

 

Girls on beach Tynemouth, 1881

Inside the bar, 1883

 

A voice from the cliffs, 1883

 

HARPER WEEKLY ARTICLE, 1883

As a frenchman has well said "Art is a state of compromises, of sacrifices" - much omitted or altered for the sake of clear showing and emphasizing of a little. Most arists accomplish this end, as we know, by the weakening process - by taking, to start with, a lower, duller, less positive key than nature's, and by then still further modifying minor things in order that the cheif may appear strong enough by contrast. To use the familiar phrase, they tone things down. But Mr Homer had gone the other way to work in these little [watercolor] marines and had toned things up. He had boldy omitted everything that could not serve his purpose - which was to show the demoniac splendor of stormy sunset skies and water - and the unsatisfied by the brilliant hues of nature had keyed them to deeper force, made them doubly powerful, the reds stronger and the blacks blacker - insisting upon and emphasizing a theme which another artist would have thought already too pronounced and too emphatic for artist use. That he could do this and keep the balance of his work is a patent proof of his artistic power.

 

For though over-statement is not more non-natural or less allowable in art than under-statement, yet under-statement is, of course, the easier, safer kind of adaptation. If this is unsuccessful, the result is simply weak; but if over-statement is unsucessful, the result is an atrocity. Mr Homer, however, was so artistic, so clear, so well poised in his exagerations, that he did more than satisfy the eye. He opened it to the full force and beauty of certain natural effects, and filled for us the sky of every future stormy sunset with memories of how his brush had interpreted its carachteristic beauty.

...his freedom from the neat little waxy prettinesses of idea and expression which are so alien to true art, but alway so delightful to childish minds, weather in bodies childish or adult.

No one can be blind to [his watercolors] in the first place or indifferent in the second, as one may be to the things by which it is encompassed on the average exhibition wall - things probably more "pretty" or more "charming", possibly more polished but in almost every case much weaker, more conventional, less riginal, and at the same time much less truthful.

M.G. Van Renselaer, Harper Magazine, November issue, 1883

 

 

 

INTERNET

Internet images (google search)

 

Sources:

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa217.htm

The Art Institute of Chicago

National Art Institute, Washington

personal webpage

---

Return back to the homepage

Return from Winslow Homer watercolors back to the Winslow Homer Paintings webpage

 

 

 

 

 

Subscribe To This Site

.