Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer | 1836–1910 | Northeaster 1895 | Oil on canvas | 87.6 x 127cm | Gift of George A Hearn 1910 (10.64.5) | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York | Photograph courtesy: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Northeaster 1895
Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is regarded by many as the greatest American painter of the nineteenth century. Born in Boston and raised in rural Cambridge, he began his career as a commercial printmaker, first in Boston and then in New York, where he settled in 1859. He briefly studied oil painting in the spring of 1861. In October of the same year, he was sent to the Civil War front in Virginia as an artist–correspondent for the new illustrated journal Harper's Weekly.
By 1890, Homer left narrative behind to concentrate on the beauty, force, and drama of the sea itself. In their dynamic compositions and richly textured passages, his late seascapes capture the look and feel (and even suggest the sound) of masses of onrushing and receding water. For Homer's contemporaries, these were the most extravagantly admired of all his works. They remain among his most famous today, appreciated for their virtuoso brushwork, depth of feeling, and hints of modernist abstraction. In the mid 1890s, Homer began a series of paintings showing only water, coast, and sky. Prouts Neck, Maine, was one of the most frequently represented sites in these works. This painting was sold by Homer to Thomas B Clarke in 1895. In 1899, the painting was returned to the artist and he reworked it by eliminating the two men who were once on the rocks at the left, and by altering the intensity of the form.
