Artist Dossier: Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer once remarked to his dealer at New York’s M. Knoedler and Company, “You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors.” Whether Homer (1836–1910), considered one of the finest American artists of the 19th century, meant that watercolors
would afford him financial independence or that they would cement his legacy is much pondered. But both interpretations have stood the test of time.

Homer produced oils, watercolors, drawings, lithographs and etchings that embody an American identity of heroic, outdoorsy individualism as relevant today as it was in the 19th century. His oeuvre ranged from the early-1860s Civil War drawings he rendered as a correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, the preeminent political news magazine of its day, to his final, dramatic seascapes in oil, painted at Prout’s Neck, Maine, at the start of the 20th century. In the decades in between, the artist made forays to a North Sea fishing village, treks to Canada and the Adirondacks and winter visits to the Bahamas, Florida and Cuba, capturing in vivid watercolor subjects he might later tackle in oil. He also created etchings in the late 1880s based on several of his Prout’s Neck oils and his watercolors from Cullercoats, England, which date to the early 1880s. 

Recent sales of Homer’s works, such as the watercolor Fishergirls Coiling Tackle, 1881, which fetched $4.5 million (est. $4–6 million)—the artist’s second-highest auction bid—at Sotheby’s New York in November 2007, testify to the enduring appeal of his pictures. And though their popularity seems to transcend the medium in which they were executed, his watercolors have dominated his market of late.

Some collectors assume that the artist’s watercolors were subordinate to his oils, because works on paper often served as studies for more finished and formal oil paintings. According to Eric Widing, head of American paintings at Christie’s New York, however, in Homer’s eyes the watercolors were neither subordinate nor studies. His regard for the medium is reflected in the number of pictures he created in it: 700 are believed to exist, versus 350 oils attributed to him.

Even those admirers of Homer’s work who possess seemingly limitless lucre may struggle to make acquisitions. Although it’s still possible to find stellar examples of Homer’s watercolors, his oils have largely been snapped up by museums and wealthy American collectors, such as Paul Mellon in the 20th century and, more recently, Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton. “American museums were already buying the oil paintings in his lifetime,” notes New York dealer Warren Adelson. “I know there’s not a major oil left in private hands except Lost on the Grand Banks”—the 1880s seascape for which Microsoft chairman Bill Gates paid a private collector more than $30 million in 1998.

The top price for a Homer oil at auction belongs to his 1875 Uncle Ned at Home, which brought $2.9 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2000. Home, Sweet Home—a circa 1863 Civil War picture of two Union soldiers in camp, far from their actual homes—was purchased by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for $2.6 million at Christie’s New York in 1997.

Homer’s overall auction record, however, was set by a watercolor: his 1889 Adirondacks picture The Red Canoe, which earned $4.8 million (est. $2–3 million) at Sotheby’s New York in 1999. The New York dealer Thomas Colville says that when the painting previously came to auction, in 1983 at Sotheby’s Parke Bernet (as the house was then known), he used “all the money I could scrape together” in an attempt to purchase it but wound up the underbidder to another dealer, who won it for $286,000 (est. $200–250,000). “When it sold for more than $4 million in 1999, I was just sick,” laments Colville, who did manage to secure Homer’s 1875 watercolor Portrait of a Lady at Sotheby’s New York in November 2007 with a bid of $2.2 million (est. $2–3 million).

The Boston-born Homer was largely self-taught. His mother, an amateur watercolorist, encouraged her son’s artistic aspirations, as did his father, a hardware importer, who arranged an apprenticeship for the boy in 1855 with a commercial lithographer. After two tedious years, Homer, determined to become a painter, left Boston for New York and began freelance work for Harper’s Weekly, where his illustrations from the front lines with the Union army made him a household name. His November 1862 wood engraving for Harper’s, The Army of the Potomac—A Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, is one of his most recognizable war images, depicting the lone sharpshooter in a tree with his weapon poised and at the same time revealing an emerging and less than honorable breed of warfare to the American public. (At press time, Kiechel Fine Art, in Lincoln, Nebraska, had an original print of this magazine page for $450.)