The Watercolors of Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer's watercolors rank among the greatest pictorial legacies of this country.

Winslow Homer's primary 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 in New England. There he turned to watercolor, in part for financial reasons (they were easier to sell), but also because the newly popular medium 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.

The Watercolors of Winslow Homer offers a lively and beautifully illustrated survey of the artist's work in a medium he pursued with originality and consummate skill. Of his more than 700 watercolors, over 140 are reproduced here, dating from the 1870s to the turn of the century. Divided into ten thematic chapters chronicling Homer's life and artistic progress, the book begins with the delightful paintings he made of children in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and ends with works bathed in the humid atmosphere of the tropics. Along the way readers will discover Homer's unparalleled range of expression, from the somber works he painted along the stormy English coast to the poetic evocations of the Adirondacks forest.