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Fresh Air
Winslow Homer
1878
Description of Original: Watercolor
20 1/16 x 14 in. (51 x 35.6 cm)
Location: Brooklyn Museum
Fresh Air is one Homer's early series of plein air watercolors depicting fancifully dressed shepherdesses that Homer made at Houghton Farm, a patron’s country estate in upstate New York. He created brilliant effects of light and atmosphere by exploiting the natural transparency of the medium and the brightness of the white paper. To achieve the subtle coloration in the sky, he applied overlapping washes of grays, pinks, and blues and then blotted them together.
Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910)
An American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art.
Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. As a youth, Homer was apprenticed to a publisher of popular lithographic prints. In 1857 he launched his career as an illustrator, moving to New York City two years later; there, he attended drawing classes at the prestigious National Academy of Design and briefly studied painting privately. During the Civil War, he went south with the Union troops as an artist-reporter for the magazine Harper’s Weekly.
After the war, Homer turned to oil painting. His first works in this medium were wartime scenes that attracted attention for their simple power and lack of sentimentality; their critical success helped gain him election to the National Academy at the age of twenty-nine.
His paintings of subjects ranging from fashionable seasonal resorts to rural childhood as well as African American life in the south broke new ground in their naturalism, directness, and rejection of obvious narrative, and revealed his exceptional command of natural light. In 1873, during a summer spent at the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, he began to work seriously in watercolor, of which he became a master.
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