Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) was an American painter, born in Boston and largely self-taught. He worked as a commercial lithographer and then for about twenty years as a magazine illustrator, including for Harper's Weekly, which sent him to sketch the Civil War front in 1861. Home, Sweet Home (1863) and later Snap the Whip (1872) and Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (1876) established his reputation as a painter of American life. He took up watercolour regularly from 1873 and gave up illustration in 1875 to live by painting. After a stay in Cullercoats in England in 1881–82 his work became more sober and monumental, and from 1883 he settled at Prouts Neck in Maine, where he painted his great sea pictures, including Eight Bells (1886) and The Gulf Stream (1899). He also travelled to Florida, Cuba and the Bahamas, and produced many watercolours of the tropics. Homer died at Prouts Neck in September 1910, aged 74. He is regarded as a leading American Realist.