Hotsed By ECN www.e-cinc.com
Tribute Piece: Winslow Homer "Snap the Whip"
Location: Coat's Funiture
305 S. Seaman (North Side Of Building)
Listed Caption:
Winslow Homer
American Artist
1836-1910
Snap the Whip
Winslow Homer's mother was an amateur artist. He was raised in Boston and was almost entirely a self-taught artist. He became an apprentice to a lithographer. He made sheet-music covers and other commercial works. By the age of 25 the Civil War launched his career as an artist correspondent with Harper's Weekly. His work was the most visual record of the war outside of photography. After the war his work became idealistic, showing real subjects as far from death and suffering as possible. In this painting there are no parents, but, the children are secure. He chose to portray choldren as strong, young, quick-witted, practical and without pretense. These children were not real - rather the way he saw their "potential". There were many war orphans on the streets begging, stealing, and causing problems. Those were the children reported in the newspapers, artists chose to go in a different direction. This was the influence for his first significant oil-paintings. "Some major artists create popular stereotypes that last for decades; others never reach into popular culture at all.
Winslow Homer was a painter of the first kind. Even today, 150 years after his birth, one sees his echoes on half the magazine racks of America. He became a water-colorist at age thirty-seven, some of his best works. "You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors," Homer once remarked, and he was almost right. The National Gallery displays his works and it is clear that Homer did more than any other nineteenth-century American artist to establish watercolor as an important medium in this country. In the grandeur of his themes and the strength of his designs, he became a dominant influence on the American realist style of painting.
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