American painter Winslow Homer’s works exhibits at the National Gallery

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) was one of the most celebrated and admired American painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writes Regina Motalib.

The first in-depth exhibition in the UK of his work will take place at the National Gallery later this year from September 10.

This exhibition is co-organised with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Consisting of more than 50 paintings and watercolours from public and private collections, spanning 40 years of the artist’s career, visitors will be able to discover an artist who is a household name in America.

Homer’s paintings and dazzling watercolours will explore the complex social and geopolitical issues of post-Civil War American life; war, race, class, power – as well as broader concerns with the fragility of human life and dominance of nature, themes that resonate with people today.

Winslow Homer: Force of Nature, will be both chronological and thematic.

Highlights of the exhibition include his paintings from the front lines of the American Civil War (1861–1865), slavery and its abolition – is the subject of one of his most famous paintings from this period, Prisoners from the Front (1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Another famous painting, The Cotton Pickers (1876, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), features two black women silhouetted against troubled skies while working in the cotton fields.

The Gulf Stream depicts a lone black man on board a small fishing boat which has lost its mast, adrift on a rolling sea.

The painting has been interpreted in turn as a reflection of the artist’s sense of isolation after the death of his father.

With its focus on an endangered black man, it also references intricate social, political, and historical issues of the era, from the legacies of slavery to the imperialist ambitions of the United States in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War.

Homer’s watercolours depicting the Bahamas, Cuba, Florida, and Bermuda capture transparent turquoise waters, lush vegetation, humid climate and dazzling tropical light.

Another focus of the exhibition will be from Homer’s time in England.

In 1881, he docked at Liverpool before heading to London where he visited the museums, studying ancient Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum and British painting at the National Gallery, including Constable’s landscapes and Turner’s oils and watercolours of peaceful seascapes and tumultuous scenes of storms and shipwrecks alike.

From London, Homer headed to Cullercoats, a small fishing community near Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

National Gallery director Dr Gabriele Finaldi, said: “Little known in Britain, Winslow Homer’s paintings explore the power, grandeur and beauty of nature as well as the dangers it poses to human life.

“Conflict in human relations, the struggle for survival, and personal isolation are among his themes, treated both poetically and with dazzling technical bravura.

The National Gallery is delighted to be sharing this exhibition with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.”

Tickets will go on general sale later this summer. Priority booking opens to Members in July.

 

Main Picture: The Bather – Picture: Los Angeles County Museum of Art