UWyo Magazine Winslow Homers Americana

January 2016 | Vol. 17, No. 2

Seesaw–Gloucester (Harper’s Weekly, September 12, 1874), 1874, wood engraving

Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910), Seesaw–Gloucester (Harper’s Weekly, September 12, 1874), 1874, wood engraving, 9-1/8 x 13-3/4 inches, Friends of the UW Art Museum Purchase, 1979.25.


The UW Art Museum presents Winslow Homer’s Harper’s Weekly illustrations.

By Nicole M. Crawford

Considered one of the foremost painters of 19th century American Art, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) began his artistic career as an illustrator. His images were seen by a large audience in the national periodical Harper’s Weekly, which led to the success of his watercolors and paintings.

Drawn from the University of Wyoming Art Museum’s permanent collection, select works by Homer are included in the exhibition The Harper’s Weekly Illustrations: Winslow Homer’s Americana on view at the UW Art Museum Jan. 30 through April 23.

Born in Boston and raised in rural Cambridge, Homer gained an appreciation for both rural and urban settings. Following an apprenticeship in a Boston lithography shop, he supported himself as a freelance illustrator, creating a variety of popular images that were subsequently published as wood engravings in Harper’s Weekly. The monthly magazine highlighted literature, politics, culture, finance and the arts of the time. Homer’s illustrations provided a rich visual component to the news in a medium that would soon be replaced by photography. Many of his popular illustrations were later realized in paintings and watercolors that are now in the collections of some of the most prominent museums across the United States.

His themes of the early 1860s ranged from stylish seaside-resort life to the horrors of the Civil War battlefield. Homer was sent to Virginia in 1861 during the war as an artist-correspondent for Harper’s Weekly. However, in the 1870s, Homer turned to his signature warm and lively scenes of leisure, recreation and play that appealed to antebellum nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent America. Even his scenes of work are idealized metaphors for social harmony.

Women at leisure and children at play were regular subjects for Homer in the post-Civil War era. In response to the desire for national healing and the challenges of urban and industrial growth, children became the symbol of America’s hope for the future, a subject shared by many American artists at the time.

Through Homer’s dramatic contrast between light and dark, in combination with clean lines and simplified forms, he was able to capture the American scene with directness. Using these techniques, his wood engravings reveal his ability to capture brilliant effects of bright sunlight, rippling water and luminous atmosphere—effects that predicted his future success with watercolor and oil.

The exhibition in the rotunda of the UW Art Museum of Winslow Homer’s Harper’s Weekly illustrations serves as a complement to the larger exhibition Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power (Jan. 30 through May 14). Kara Walker overlays her iconic silhouette figures on enlarged reproductions from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, an illustrated compilation of news reports about the Civil War that was first published in 1866, to create distinctive contemporary works that encourage a historical re-examination.

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