Fresh Air

Winslow Homer is recognized as a dominant figure in nineteenth-century American art and his era’s foremost exponent of realism. Based on direct observation, his works of the 1860s and 1870s reveal actualities of American life that went unrecorded by other artists. Homer’s art from the 1880s through his death in 1910 dealt primarily with mortality and the forces of nature, conveying these essential themes in potent images in which light, shadow, and composition play powerful expressive roles. Today, Homer remains one of the most esteemed and cherished of American artists of all time.