Man and nature: the art of Winslow Homer.

• Author: Brock, Charles

WINSLOW HOMER first received critical recognition for his insightful portrayal of the Civil War. Nationally acclaimed as an illustrator and painter by the age of 30, he began to work regularly in watercolor as well as oil in the early 1870s, creating classic images of American life. Later in his career, he rendered the coast of Maine, at Prout's Neck, in a series of dramatic seascapes that profoundly influenced such early-20th-century American artists as George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Homer belongs to the generation of modernists that includes James McNeill Whistler and the French masters Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Claude Monet. Like his European counterparts, he depicted contemporary life and was fascinated with how the play of outdoor light in nature affects color and form.

Born in Boston, Mass., in 1836, Homer spent his childhood in the then rural suburb of Cambridge. As a young man, he was apprenticed to a commercial lithographer for two years before becoming a freelance illustrator in 1857. Homer soon became a major contributor of wood engravings to popular magazines such as Harper's Weekly. In 1859, he moved to New York to be closer to the publishers who commissioned his illustrations, his main source of income, and to pursue his ambitions as a painter. He rented a studio, attended life classes at the National Academy of Design, and immersed himself in the artistic life of the city.

The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 altered the course of Homer's career. Late in the year, his family made plans to help send him to Europe to complete his artistic education. By then, though, Homer already had been to the front and fully was committed to his job as a war artist for Harper's. His first important painting of the conflict, "Sharpshooter," revealed his immediate understanding of the war's essential modernity. Unlike conventional battle pictures, which, as a contemporary described them, depicted "long lines led on by generals in cocked hats," Homer showed a solitary figure who, because of new rifle technology, was able to fire at a distance and in isolation from his target. Homer's paintings of the war were profoundly democratic in character. Scenes of camp life during the calm interludes between battles sympathetically illuminated the physical and psychological plight of ordinary individual soldiers.

After the war, Homer turned to coastal and rural scenes of peacetime America. In "Long Branch, New Jersey," he surveyed the mix of social classes at this seaside resort. Homer, like his...