ZACKANTHONY.COM

Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts and, when he was 19, was apprenticed to a commercial lithographer. Despite having almost no formal training in art, Homer moved to New York in 1859 and opened his own studio as a painter and illustrator. He took art classes and was a regular freelance illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and other important magazines of the day. They would be his major source of income for the next 17 years. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Harper’s sent him to the front lines to document the fighting. He made faithful sketches of the battle scenes and ordinary life in the camps. Although these did not get Homer much artistic recognition at the time the drawings, with their strong draftsmanship and realism, are today considered to be among the best of America?s graphic arts. After the war, Homer produced a series of paintings influenced by scenes he had witnessed, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, and Prisoners from the Front, which was exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1866. In the same year he traveled to Paris and stayed there for ten months. Ten years after the end of the Civil War, Winslow Homer was in his mid-40s and an acclaimed painter and illustrator. Snap the Whip, painted in 1872, was exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and, in the same year, he decided to abandon illustration and devote himself to painting. But perhaps the most significant development in Homer?s artistic career came with his adoption of watercolors. He is quoted as saying “You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors” and, indeed, the success he achieved with these fresh and spontaneous works permitted him to stop working as an illustrator. At this time, Homer never went anywhere without brushes, paper and his pans of watercolors. He started depicting the coast of New England, the Adirondacks, the wild rivers of Quebec, the Florida Keys and the whitewashed walls of Bermuda. In 1881 Homer returned to Europe and spent the next two years in Cullercoats, a small fishing village on the stormy North Sea coast of England. His subject matter was the sea and the courageous inhabitants of the small struggling community. The watercolors he produced of the village women going about their daily lives or waiting for their menfolk to return from a fishing expedition are some of the most powerful images produced by the artist. Back in the U. S. he went to live in Prout’s Neck, Maine where he built a studio on the rocky sea shore that was to be his home until he died. Winslow Homer lived there alone, isolated and free to devote himself to his art. It is at this time that he began painting the seascapes for which he is best known such as Gulf Stream, Eight Bells, and Mending the Nets. His paintings underwent a fundamental change. He was now concentrating on the force, drama, and wild beauty of the ocean. His style was powerful and self-confident. Homer never spoke about the reasons for this self-imposed seclusion; it?s thought that perhaps an unhappy love affair might have been the cause. Winslow Homer died on September 29, 1910 in his studio at Prout’s Neck. He was 74 years old. His painting, Shoot the Rapids, remained unfinished. You can find a wide collection of Winslow Homer paint by number patterns at the Segmation web site.   These patterns may be viewed, painted, and printed using SegPlay™PC a fun, computerized paint-by-numbers program for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.