Home › Books › Winslow Homer: American Passage
Winslow Homer: American Passage
by
73/99
Critics' Rating Index
56/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
77/99
Volume of Reviews
16/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
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 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
Reviews
"A rich biography of the towering artist who captured the realities of 19th-century America ..."
"It is fun to be reminded, in Cross's biography, of all the criticism that came Homer's way."
"The tale chugs along on a track of 'would haves' and 'must haves'."
"Vivid storytelling melds with exuberant analysis in this sweeping look at a canonical American artist's vibrant life ..."
"This low-key radical was overdue for a thorough, historically anchored reconsideration, which Cross provides with skill, insight, and precision ..."
"He constructs a reliable narrative of the artist's movements and residences, of his friendships and financial arrangements and, most important, of his shift from fluent magazine illustrator to painter of enigmatic depictions of nature and everyday life ..."
"Cross seeks to provide a wider context, and while the material remains thin, one is grateful for every scrap that shows Homer living as a painter among painters ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!