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Winslow Homer: American Passage
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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
"Cross reveals how Homer's radiant and dramatic paintings are also shaped by profound questions about humankind's place in the glory of nature."
"It is fun to be reminded, in Cross's biography, of all the criticism that came Homer's way."
"Cross captures much of the artist's achievement in his fine biography."
"This deeply contextualized portrait features more than 400 images, including maps drawn specifically for this volume."
"Cross's scrupulous new book is devoted to Homer as both man and artist and is largely a pleasure to read, despite the inevitable difficulties of the subject: call him repressed; call him, as Cross does, 'a misfit by nature' or even a 'human periscope,' who liked to observe others without being seen."
"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 alerts us to the theories, but warns that there are only 'a few shreds of evidence' of any specific sexual dalliance ..."
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