Homer, Winslow

WINSLOW HOMER: AN AMERICAN VISION, by Randall C. Griffin, is the first major critical survey on the life and work of Homer, one of America's best-loved artists, in the last decade. The book features every one of his major paintings alongside a remarkable selection of his lesser-known etchings and woodcuts. Griffin's thoroughly researched, yet readable study, not only presents a full account of Homer's life and work, but also a fresh and provocative reassessment of his place in the history of American art.

Randall Griffin, Associate Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University and an authority on Homer, begins his study of the life and works of the artist with the astute observation, "Like the poems of Walt Whitman, the pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe, the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the music of Duke Ellington, the works of Winslow have helped shape America's view of itself." Griffin argues that Homer's work exemplifies the aspiration to create specifically American subjects and a specifically American character.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was born in Boston, Massachusetts the same year that Davey Crockett died at the Alamo. He began his career a magazine illustrator and soon becoming a regular contributor to Harper's Weekly. In the early 1860's, Homer was sent by his editor to the front lines of The Civil War, where he began to work on woodcuts and lithographs of wartime encampments, some of his lesser-known pieces that are included in this monograph. In the post-war years Homer turned his attention to the American countryside and its people, and produced Snap the Whip, a painting thought by many to be his best work. This painting was embraced by critics as a nationalist masterpiece, reaffirming American ideals and values that had been lost during the war. In 1883, Homer moved to the New England fishing village of Prout's Neck, Maine and, utilizing his watercolor skills, began what was to become his best-known period of seascapes and nautical scenes.

Griffin presents an academic yet approachable study of this American classic, expanding on the criticisms and themes of Homer's work, such as post-war American values, the relationship between nature and man, the American pastoral, and the loss of manhood control. WINSLOW HOMER: AN AMERICAN VISION presents an exceptional array of Homer's gorgeous paintings, sketches and watercolors and is the most up to date monograph available on the artist. This beautiful selection of works, paired with Griffin's original research and fresh interpretation, makes this a timeless book that will compliment any library as well as satisfy the needs of scholars and general readers alike.

As for the text of the book, it is interesting, informative, and insightful. Altogether, this is a very well put together book; it is one of the finest books I have in my collection.

The hundreds of paintings reproduced in this large-format book deserve five stars. The publisher should be thanked for bringing together works scattered around a large number of museums, and for giving us a finely produced art book. Even fans of Winslow Homer will not have seen most of these paintings, which may represent the summit of American watercolors. Unfortunately, the accompanying text goes far beyond what is necessary to appreciate Homer's art. The descriptions of personal history and technique are helpful, but not the philosophical musings and overwrought interpretations. The text should have been cut by a third.

Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz: The Search for American Identity in the Gilded Age

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Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz: The Search for American Identity in the Gilded Age
Randall C. Griffin , Winslow Homer , Thomas Eakins , and Thomas Pollock Anshutz
Manufacturer: Pennsylvania State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0271023295

Not only does Griffin trace the interplay of issues of nationalism, class, and gender in American culture, but he also offers insightful readings of key paintings by Eakins and other canonical artists. Further, Griffin shows that by 1900 the nationalist project in art and criticism had helped open the way for the formulation of American modernism.

Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz will be of importance to all those interested in American culture as well as to specialists in art history and art criticism.

Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Vol 2

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Carmen Thyssen-Bornemixza Collection Vol 1 & 2

Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Vol 2
Paul Gauguin , Camille Pissarro , Thomas Llorens , Georges Braque , Robert Delaunay , Childe Hassam , Winslow Homer , Edward Hopper , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Paul Signac , Alfred Sisley , Edouard Vuillard , Pierre Bonnard , Edgar Degas , Henri Matisse , Claude Monet , Edvard Munch , and Emil Nolde
Manufacturer: Ediciones el Viso/Fundaci n Colecci n Thyssen-Bornemisza
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Prado Museum

ASIN: 8496233073
Release Date: 2005-03-15

Waves battering the weathered rocks on a shore, young boys sailing carefree on open waters: Winslow Homer’s raw, evocative seascapes are among the most distinctive and powerful in American art. Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea offers here a fresh exploration of Homer and his career-long preoccupation with the relationship between humans and the waters that define their world. This exhibition catalog organizes Homer’s sea-centered works by four periods that correspond to geographic locations: Gloucester, Massachusetts and other early East Coast seascapes; Cullercoats, England; Prout’s Neck in Maine; and notations from his trips to tropical regions such as the Bahamas and fishing retreats such as the Adirondacks in New York. Distinguished European and American scholars, in a series of incisive essays, argue that Homer’s seascapes need to be reevaluated. While acknowledging that most understand his paintings as premier examples of American realism, the contributors show that they are also distinctly modern in a way that set Homer radically apart from his contemporaries. Nowhere is this more evident than in his seascapes, where abstractions and expression battle his pictorial realism. The moving emotional undertones of his seascapes emerge in the compelling full-color reproductions featured in the catalog, as his paintings simultaneously capture the unique landscape of their geographic settings, the universality of man’s relationship to the sea, and issues of pictorial representation in general. Published in conjunction with exhibitions at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Musée d’Art Américain in Giverny, Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea offers a new view of an American master.