Winslow Homer
1836 ... 1910 · Prouts Neck, Maine
Biography
Winslow Homer learned to draw on deadline. He apprenticed at a Boston lithography shop as a teenager, then sold illustrations to magazines, then went to the Civil War as a field artist for Harper's Weekly. He had almost no formal art training.
In 1883 he moved to Prouts Neck on the Maine coast and built a studio a short walk from the water. He spent winters in Florida, Cuba and the Bahamas. He painted the ocean the way a person paints something he watched every single day.
How Winslow Homer Worked
Homer worked outdoors from the real thing, then finished the larger oils indoors. Breezing Up shows that habit better than any story about it could. He began the canvas in New York in 1873 from sketches made at Gloucester, and he kept reworking it until 1876. Infrared scans at the National Gallery of Art found a fourth boy near the mast that he painted out, plus a second schooner in the distance that he removed. The decisions are still sitting there under the top layer of paint.
What Backs This Record
Museum catalogue records, an ownership history traced back to the artist himself, and conservation scans that show the changes he made inside the paint.
Homer died in 1910, so the work itself is out of copyright. You can copy it, print it or build on it. A museum can still set terms for its own photograph of a painting, so read that record before you reuse an image file.