Prints and Authors in the Time of Manet

Boys Beaching a Dory

Watercolor, pencil, and gouache on paper, 1880
Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her father, Maurice A. Scott, 1950.274

Winslow Homer was chiefly self-taught as an artist. He began producing illustrations for Harper’s Weekly in 1857 and became an artist/correspondent with the Union Army during the Civil War. He began seriously painting in watercolor in 1873. Homer eventually settled in Maine while spending the winters in Cuba, the Bahamas, Florida, or Bermuda, and the summers in the Adirondacks and Canada. Despite his isolation from the art world, Homer achieved wide recognition in his lifetime, and is ranked as one of the great realists of American painting.
Homer spent the summer of 1880 at Gloucester, Massachusetts., where he made more than a hundred watercolors of life in a fishing community.