Winslow Homer’s career was a bifurcated one. In his early professional years, he was a New York–based illustrator for Harper’s and other publications, chronicling most notably the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, and working mostly in engravings while painting the occasional oil composition. The late-career Homer we know much better: he the solitary painter of Prouts Neck and master of the maritime sublime. Between these two periods, Homer traveled extensively and began to experiment in both medium and style, working for the first time in watercolor. He also gravitated towards the seashore, spending summers around the Northeast and in particular Gloucester, Massachusetts. “Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey,” now showing at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, presents a chronological story of this metamorphosis.
The exhibition opens with a selection of sketches and engravings from Long Branch, New Jersey, where Homer first began to depict the shore. He was still very much a newsweekly illustrator, and human figures remain prominent in these early works, which tell the story of a nation rediscovering leisure after the trauma of the Civil War. While these paintings and engravings marked Homer’s first documented foray to the seashore, the images from New Jersey were not a substantial stylistic or thematic departure from his early career.
In 1869, Homer traveled to Gloucester for the first time, where he composed his