Praeterita

After writing a 1,000 word piece about Winslow Homer's eighteen month stay at an English fishing village, I have been writing a series of primers about other artists who made similar journeys. Links to the series here: Gauguin ; Manet ; John Marin ; JMW Turner ; Monet . In the final post in this series, I rate Winslow Homer himself. Winslow Homer, The Northeaster , oil on canvas, 1895 Who Winslow Homer (1836-1910), American landscape and marine painter. Coastal associatio n The coast of New England in the USA, and Cullercoats, in the north of England. First coastal visit Like several painters in this series, Homer was born near the sea (Boston, Massachussetts), spent much time inland or in big cities while building his career, then returned to the coast, this time that of Maine, in 1883. Reasons for visiting Homer had painted marine scenes before the 1880s, but it was his two year stay in Cullercoats, a tiny fishing cove on the northeast coast of England, t...

Looking Out to Sea , watercolour This story about a recent exhibition of Winslow Homer’s paintings and drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum begins with some personal details. I was born and raised in the north-east of England, in an area of farms and coal mines lying between Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a small coastal village called Cullercoats . England may be a small country, but in the British context the north-east is considered remote from ‘the center’ (i.e., London). This was even more true in the nineteenth century, when Cullercoats was a tiny dot on the map, just one of thousands of little bays on the coasts where close-knit communities of tough men and women made a dangerous living from the sea. How extraordinary it is, then, to discover that American artist Winslow Homer lived and worked in Cullercoats, England, for close to two years beginning in May 1881. Biographers are unsure as to why Homer chose such an obscure place for this extended stay. Nevertheless, it fits int...

Ava, a friend who lives in Texas (though she always points out that her heart belongs in San Francisco), pointed me to the above print by Winslow Homer. It was commissioned in 1860, when he was 24 years old, and it's actually an acid political cartoon about the starving poor and the gorging rich. So nothing much has changed there, then. Here's a link to the New York Times article, too: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/an-american-thanksgiving-skewered-and-roasted/ Gobble Gobble!   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader