Painting Nature on the Wing

he Sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks, " wrote Winslow Homer to his brother Charles, putting into words what drove his art (1). All his life, the artist " noticed " —not just the rising and setting sun from his home near the ocean at Prouts Neck, Maine, but everything around him: people; scenery of his hunting and fishing trips; wildlife, which he painted with passion; objects and details others would never imagine the subject of art; and the effect, movement, and inner life of these. As he gave drawing instructions to his friend and fellow artist James Edward Kelly (1855–1933), Homer once said, " You should practice drawing old shoes and getting their charac-ter….You should practice drawing high hats…. There is a great deal of drawing in a high hat, to get not only its curves, but its delicate variations in the outline which gives it style " (2). In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he grew up, Homer was exposed to art and encouraged to draw at an early age. His mother, Henrietta Benson, a successful illus-trator of flowers and other still life, taught him watercolor painting and foresaw his " future greatness. " Hers were the only works, besides his own, found in Homer's studio after his death. As a youth, he was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer and later took evening classes at the National Academy of Design in New York, but he was primarily self-taught, his career marked by continued growth (3). At age 21, Homer became a freelance illustrator and in no time he was working for the prestigious Harper's Weekly. Soon, the Civil War broke out. Sent to the battlefields as artist-correspondent, he turned his observant eye not to war action and combat but to soldiers' plight. He sketched from life at camp then converted sketches into engravings at his studio in New York. Documenting drab labor behind the lines and the soldiers' loneliness and alienation gained him national recognition. " Quite late this man went to Europe and studied there and found things ready to his hand, but I do not know what more he got beyond what he had already, " wrote John LaFarge (1835–1910), Homer's friend and fellow artist (2). Homer's time in Paris, after the war, and in Cullercoats, an English fishing village and artists' colony on the North Sea, had little influence on his style. …