Sharpshooter

Winslow Homer was a painter. He thought of himself as a painter and directed his greatest efforts toward this art form. Whether with oils or watercolors, he sought to push his painting to address large themes, and did so in a vocabulary that broke from many American traditions. As an artist devoted to the world as it is, he saw painting as an effort not only to record a particular place and time,...

In the early 1880s, the American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sketched a tragic scene: a capsized boat foundering near a rocky shore lined with trees. At least one figure appears to be floating in the...

Winslow Homer (see figure 1), who created among the most breathtaking and influential images in the history of watercolor, was, famously, a man who received almost no formal artistic education. Acknowledged even in his own day as America’s most “original” and “independent” painter in watercolors, he had an intuitive rather than a tutored relationship with this challenging yet flexible medium. Between 1873 and 1905, he created nearly 700 watercolors. A staple of his livelihood, these works were …