WINSLOW HOMER: A Portrait

Even in childhood, ""Winslow Homer possessed an inner capacity to record life's poignancy with the sensitivity of a dry point etching."" His works have been hailed as ""admirable examples of painting the essential and omitting the incidental,"" and this approach was typical of his personal habits as well. His early experience as a lithographer's apprentice, and the exacting task of reporting the Civil War in a series of on-the-spot sketches for an illustrated were to provide the groundwork for a long and pro as un of interpreted realism in the Italian verismo sense, selective elements and grouped according to a scheme inherent in the nature of the scenes being the practical side of his nature was satisfied that he could support himself by means of his paintings. Homer chose to leave the Bohemian surroundings of Greenwich Village to return to his native New England coast, taking up an if more isolated life completely absorbed by the moods of the ocean, which were to appear in all his art thereafter. Jean Gould's study of Homer's slow, patient, at times painful rise to fame is not the first biography of him, and there are a number of books leading with his technique and style. The present volume does, however, appeal more to the general reader who may have seen and enjoyed samples of Homer's work in large and small museums across the country.