Winslow Homer: American Passage

by William R. Cross

Overview

The definitive life of the painter who forged American identity visually, in art and illustration, with an impact comparable to that of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in poetry and prose—yet whose own story has remained largely untold.

In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.”

Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. He created multivalent visual tales, both quintessentially American and quietly replete with narrative for and about people of all races and ages. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning.

Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today.

Includes Color Images and Maps

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374603793
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	376,523
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

William R. Cross is an independent scholar and a consultant to art and history museums. He served as the curator of Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869–1880, a nationally renowned 2019 exhibition on the formation of Winslow Homer as a marine painter. He is the chairman of the advisory board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Cross and his wife, Ellen, the parents of two grown sons, live on Cape Ann, north of Boston, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

1 Middle Son (1836-1859) 13

2 A Taste of Freedom (1859-1862) 40

3 The Freedom of All Mankind (1862-1866) 73

4 The Proof of a Poet (1866-1867) 104

5 Lines of Hand and Heart (1867-1872) 127

6 Centennial Truths (1873-1877) 165

7 Telling it Slant (1877-1881) 213

8 On the Edge (1881-1884) 247

9 Counting the Cost (1884-1889) 290

10 A Flourishing Condition (1889-1893) 322

11 The Life that I Have Chosen (1894-1898) 352

12 Alive with a Reputation (1898-1902) 383

13 Tide Taken at the Flood (1903-1910) 411

Epilogue: Myth and Memory 432

Notes 437

Bibliography 519

Acknowledgments 523

Index 527

Editorial Reviews

02/28/2022

Vivid storytelling melds with exuberant analysis in this sweeping look at a canonical American artist’s vibrant life. Art curator Cross (Homer at the Beach) delves into the world of Winslow Homer (1836–1910), a painter whose “search for balance, order, and beauty amid the conflicts he confronted,” Cross argues, imbued him with a canny ability to capture both the experiences of “ordinary people” and “powerful forces of nature.” Drawing from letters, diaries of friends, and published interviews, Cross follows Homer’s artistic quest—from his early commercial pictorial wood print drawings in the mid-1850s to the solemn portraits he published in Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War, to the vivid rendering of natural landscapes that became synonymous with his name. Cross draws insightful connections between Homer’s life events and his works—citing, in one example, his “mother’s declining health” as being responsible for the “mortal themes” present in such famous works as his “American masterpiece,” The Life Line (1884). No stone in Homer’s life is left unturned nor brushstroke of deliberately placed light left unexplored under Cross’s meticulous eye. While occasionally dense, the rich descriptions and reproductions of Homer’s art will beckon readers along. Art connoisseurs will want to make room on their shelves for this definitive guide to a great American artist. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2022-04-12
A rich biography of the towering artist who captured the realities of 19th-century America.

Drawing on abundant scholarship and archival sources, Cross chronicles in vibrant detail the career, travels, friendships, and prolific output of Winslow Homer (1836-1910). With no diaries and few letters available to document much of his subject’s life, Cross speculates about what the artist “may have” or “appears to have” done or felt. But the author is so deeply cognizant of 19th-century art, history, and material culture that his inferences are thoroughly persuasive. Growing up in Boston, Homer was encouraged by his mother, an artist herself. As a young man, Homer worked for a prominent Boston lithographer, soon contributing wood engravings to illustrated magazines, notably Harper’s Weekly, which became his principal client. During the Civil War, he made several stays at the front, sketching scenes of camp life for Harper’s. The successful illustrator, though, aspired to be recognized as a painter. Moving from Boston to New York in 1859, Homer began to submit his work to group exhibitions. In 1866, he sailed for Europe, where he visited museums and galleries—Cross recounts the works he would have seen—and although no drawings survive from that trip, he brought back many pastoral scenes that he painted in the French countryside. By the time he returned 10 months later, Cross notes, “he returned to America penniless,” intent on marketing his work to wealthy buyers. The oils and watercolors that Homer produced for the next decades of his life, as he grew increasingly famous, reflect the landscapes in which he thrived: the White Mountains, Jersey shore, Caribbean, Adirondacks, and Prouts Neck, Maine, where his family had bought property. His subjects often were ordinary men and women—including those newly freed from slavery—engaged in work or pleasure. This deeply contextualized portrait features more than 400 images, including maps drawn specifically for this volume.

Gracefully written, empathetic, and authoritative.

Kirkus Reviews

"Certain to be definitive . . . William R. Cross has a special talent for discerning details most of us overlook, and he provides a rich commentary on Homer’s technique, his influences, and even occasional submerged biographical reference, which the painter rarely allowed himself to convey. The biographer’s close attention is worthy of his subject." —Randall Fuller, The Wall Street Journal

" An exemplary biography . . . [Cross] demonstrates that Homer emerged as a storyteller of enormous power and subtlety in a period — the 1860s — when America was casting around for the right story to tell about itself." —Sebastian Smee, The Washington Post

"[William] Cross reveals how Homer’s radiant and dramatic paintings are also shaped by profound questions about humankind’s place in the glory of nature . . . With plentiful color reproductions, Cross’s meticulous, vivid, and revelatory biography transforms our appreciation for this quietly steadfast and subtly trailblazing artist." —Donna Seaman, Booklist (Starred Review)

"This deeply contextualized portrait features more than 400 images, including maps drawn specifically for this volume . . . Gracefully written, empathetic, and authoritative." —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"Vivid storytelling melds with exuberant analysis in this sweeping look at a canonical American artist’s vibrant life . . . No stone in Homer’s life is left unturned nor brushstroke of deliberately placed light left unexplored under Cross’s meticulous eye . . . Art connoisseurs will want to make room on their shelves for this definitive guide to a great American artist." —Publishers Weekly

"Cross has done an admirable job of bringing to life this most American of painters. Finally, Winslow Homer's brilliant work and fascinating life are united in one volume." —Ken Burns, filmmaker

“This rich biography of Winslow Homer is long overdue. The artist’s enduring importance to the history of American Art brooks no argument. As we discover in this book, the many nuances of his life story also add richness to our understanding of history, place, and innovation in the United States.” —Martha Tedeschi, author (with Kristi Dahm) of Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light

“This intelligent and gracefully-written book is the first substantial new biography of Homer in years, and it’s a multilayered pleasure to read. Cross is a sensitive observer of every aspect of the man, his times, and his career, from abolitionism and Civil War battlefields to the highs and lows of making a living from a capricious marketplace for art. A triumph.” —Adam Hochschild, author of Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes

"Our visual understanding of the 19th century and especially of the Civil War comes to us in no small part from Winslow Homer. In this sweeping and comprehensive consideration of Homer’s life and work, William R. Cross offers fresh insight into how his art was shaped and enabled by the changing politics, society, and technology of the world he sought to depict." —Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

"For anyone whose curiosity was fired by one of the ubiquitous copies of the melancholy marine paintings of the master, William R. Cross's Winslow Homer: American Passage is a revelation. Homer, it emerges, was a narrative as well as an aesthetic genius, bearing witness to the lives of ordinary people and momentous if often overlooked occasions, capturing soldiers at camp in the Civil War, police forcing Frederick Douglass from the stage at a Boston abolitionist meeting, a shipwreck survivor eyed by sharks at sea. Full of insight, sensitively written, this superb biography tells the story of an artist who had the moral heart of an historian." —Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

From the Publisher