When Winslow Homer sailed to England in March of 1881, he was already well established as a leading member of his generation of American artists. Critics often referred to him as the "most American of American artists", combining praise with the implication that his work was provincial compared to that of his more European-trained American contemporaries. However, upon his return, after a year and a half spent in the seaside village of Cullercoats, Homer's work garnered rave reviews and gained a new appreciation among art dealers. In this book, Tatham's detailed account of Homer's time in Cullercoats offers a perceptive reappraisal of both the village's influence on his work and the paintings themselves. In his Cullercoats paintings, Homer took as his main subject the lives and labors of the village's women and their strong sense of community. In many ways, these paintings stand among Homer's most original and perceptive depictions of women, but they also display his masterly uses of watercolor. The Cullercoats paintings show Homer in a new light, and Tatham's revelatory account provides the long-overdue attention they deserve.

The only comprehensive volume of Homer's magazine illustrations, with extensive scholarly treatment. Winslow Homer (1836-1910), arguably the best-known American artist of the nineteenth century, created three distinctly different bodies of work in the course of his long career: paintings, book illustrations, and illustrations for the pictorial press, the magazine-like illustrated journals of his day. A number of books and exhibition catalogues have dealt with his career as a painter, and historian David Tatham treated all of Homer's work as an illustrator of literature in his Winslow Homer and the Illustrated Book. Now, ten years later, Tatham has completed a full, scholarly account of Homer's work for pictorial magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Appleton's Monthly, and Every Saturday. Homer's work for pictorial magazines is substantial, to say the least. It amounts to some 250 wood-engraved images published between 1857 and 1875. These wood engravings are collected assiduously and are exhibited frequently in museums. They differ from Homer's book illustrations in that they are independent from the texts; Homer chose and treated the great majority of his magazine subjects much as he did his paintings. They are, in essence, original works of graphic art. The illustrations reproduced here cover a remarkable range. They constitute the first substantial body of American art about the life of the city streets, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, abolition, and the New Woman. They include compelling treatments of the Civil War, rural childhood, and wilderness. They also comprise an essential contribution to the study of one of the masters of American art.

In this lavishly illustrated volume, David Tatham turns his eye to Winslow Homer's Adirondack oils, drawings, prints, and watercolors - more than a hundred pieces from the artist's many visits to the region between 1870 and 1910. Homer's affinity for this remote region of New York State lasted for forty years. No other place - not even Prout's Neck in Maine - held his attention as an artist for so long a period. Nearly every time he set out for the Adirondacks he went to the same two places - the environs of Keene Valley and a group of rustic buildings in a forest clearing in the Essex County township of Minerva, south of the High Peaks. Tatham casts Homer's early Adirondack works as postbellum pastorals and explores the impact of Darwinian thought on Homer's later works. He examines the concepts of landscape and wilderness, the development of the Adirondack park, and the forest preservation movement, as well as Homer's contemporaneous work in Maine, the Caribbean, and England.

When Winslow Homer sailed to England in March of 1881, he was already well established as a leading member of his generation of American artists. Critics often referred to him as the "most American of American artists", combining praise with the implication that his work was provincial compared to that of his more European-trained American contemporaries. However, upon his return, after a year and a half spent in the seaside village of Cullercoats, Homer's work garnered rave reviews and gained a new appreciation among art dealers. In this book, Tatham's detailed account of Homer's time in Cullercoats offers a perceptive reappraisal of both the village's influence on his work and the paintings themselves. In his Cullercoats paintings, Homer took as his main subject the lives and labors of the village's women and their strong sense of community. In many ways, these paintings stand among Homer's most original and perceptive depictions of women, but they also display his masterly uses of watercolor. The Cullercoats paintings show Homer in a new light, and Tatham's revelatory account provides the long-overdue attention they deserve.

Though a Bostonian by birth and upbringing, Winslow Homer lived and maintained his studio in New York City for twenty-five years, establishing himself as a leading figure in New York's art world. In 1881, determined to broaden his status as a painter, Homer journeyed to Great Britain. During his trip, major changes appeared in nearly everything he did as a painter. The changes came so rapidly during his first months abroad that there can be little doubt that the crucial turning point occurred during his first weeks in London. After his return to New York in November of 1882 and during his later years in Maine, the sequence of major oil paintings that came from his brush owed much, in the most fundamental ways, to transformations that began in London. Tatham's book Winslow Homer in London: A New York Artist Abroad is the first to examine in detail this preeminent American painter's crucial weeks in London during his year and half in Great Britain. Tatham pres ents new information concerning Homer's time in the city, the centuries-old American associations of his London neighborhood, and his visits to London art institutions; he also considers in detail the artist's iconic painting The Houses of Parliament. Concluding chapters consider New York's reception of Homer's post-London paintings from the fishing village of Cullercoats and show how London and this village together formed the foundation for the major paintings of the artist's later career. Tatham's acute examination is enhanced with several illustrations of Homer's most celebrated paintings.

For well over a century, New York has been a microcosm of the art and craft of American printmaking. Until 1825, printmaking in America was almost entirely an artisan's craft. Then, with the arrival of lithography, the realization arose that printmaking could also be a fine art. The essays published in this collection contribute to the body of scholarship by identifying important but hitherto insufficiently studied aspects of the graphic arts and treating them authoritatively. Their subjects concern prints in New York State, whose great metropolitan city was, after 1825, the acknowledged center of nearly everything important in the graphic arts in the U.S. The history of American prints from 1825 on is enormously rich, yet until the 1970s it was the least studied and understood aspect of the history of art in North America. It is a history more deeply rooted in popular culture and more closely tied, for a long time, to the world of commerce than the other arts. The usually small-scale, sometimes ephemeral, and often highly subtle (or highly unsubtle) nature of prints makes it easy to overlook them. The collection of essays included here were originally presented at the Twelfth Annual North American Print Conference, held in 1981 in Syracuse, New York. Locally organized, these conferences have been held during the last decade throughout the U.S. and Canada to further the study of the history of the pictorial graphic arts in North America. Contributors include several leading historians of the graphic arts of nineteenth-century America. Their chapters bring to life and flesh out figures who were previously little more than names, establish facts that correct long-held erroneous assumptions, introduce many prints of exceptional interest that have remained out of the public view for generations, and provide a rich, new context for many familiar images.

In this collection of essays, eight contemporary scholars examine the rich diversity in the subject, style, and geography of printmaking from 1913-1947, a singular period of artistic creation. Also, three distinguished printmakers, who were active during the 1930s and 1940s, share their recollections of those decades, offering rare, first hand accounts of the political, social, and cultural elements that influenced the artists and their work. Tatham has chosen two watershed events, the Armory Show of 1913 and the important Brooklyn Museum exhibition of 1947, as the temporal bookends for this collection. Recognizing this era as wholly distinct from what had gone before and what was to come after it in graphic arts, the volume's contributors illuminate the period's spirited and vital debate about style, content, and the role of prints in society. Offering fresh assessments and newly understood historical contexts, the essays bring well-deserved attention to artists whose work has often been neglected, while it reexamines the works of well-known artists. This volume represents an important contribution to the study of printmaking by illustrating the way in which historical and contemporary graphic arts occupy a vital and central presence in the culture of our times.

This study introduces a little-known aspect of the work of the artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910). In particular, it focuses on his work as an illustrator of books and literary magazines, where, for almost three decades, he pictorialised the works of Bryant, Longfellow, Tennyson and Whittier.