Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836—September 29, 1910) was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836, into a middle class family. Homer was the second of three sons, and both his parents from long lines of New Englanders. His mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist and his first teacher, who contributed a lot to Homer’s watercolors. He also had a close relationship with her mother throughout their lives. Homer tokk on many of his mother’s traits, including her quiet, strong-willed, terse, sociable nature, her dry sense of humor, and her artistic talent. His father was a good businesman but always looking to “make a killing” and his mother received a good education, these made him grew up well and living in an art environment. He had a happy childhood and was an average student, but his art talent was evident in his early years.
In 1859, Homer opened a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City. Until 1863, he attended lasses at the National Academy of Design, and studied briefly with Frederic Rondel, who taught him the basics of painting. In only about a year of self-training, Homer was producing excellent oil work. The illustrator Homer painted about a dozen small paintings during the stay in Paris after exhibiting at the National Academy of Design. Although he arrived in France at a time of new fashions in art, Homer’s main subject for his paintings was peasant life, showing more of an alignment with the established French Barbizon school and artist Millet than with newer artists Manet and Courbet. And although the drawings did not get much attention at that time, they mark Homer’s expanding skills from illustrator to painter. He even illustrated women during war time, and showed the effects of the war on the home front and the war work was dangerous and exhausting. After the war, he turned his attention primarily to scenes of childhood and young women, reflecting nostalgia for simpler times, both his own and the nation as a whole. Homer was also interested in postwar subject matter that conveyed the silent tension between two communities seeking to understand their future.
The illustrator Homer started painting with watercolors on a regular basis in 1873 during a summer stay in Gloucester, Massachusetts. From the beginning, the technique in Homer’s watercolors was natural, fluid and confident, demonstrating his innate talent for a difficult medium. Homer’s watercolors proved popular and enduring, and sold more readily, improving his financial condition considerably. His realism was objective, true to nature, and emotionally controlled. At nearly the beginning of his painting career, Homer demonstrated a maturity of feeling, depth of perception, and mastery of technique which was immediately recognized. One critic wrote, “Winslow Homer is one of those few young artists who make a decided impression of their power with their very first contributions to the Academy…He at this moment wields a better pencil, models better, colors better, than many whom, were it not improper, we could mention as regular contributors to the Academy”.
As a result of disappointments with women or from some other emotional turmoil, the illustrator Homer became reclusive in the late 1870, no longer enjoying urban social life and living instead in Gloucester. In re-establishing his love of the sea, Homer found a rich source of themes while closely observing the fishermen, the sea, and the marine weather. Most claimed that artists alone, because he was deeply shy in front of women. However, Homer’s portraits for female were nuanced, reflecting his rare respect and understanding of the women of that era. Homer respected others, so he won the respects of others at the same time. As for this kind of person, his works were, and are, more worth to colllect. Oil painting reproductions of Winslow Homer are selling on the site, each work copied by our artists’ handmade. If you desire to collect one as well,  please contact us !