fbpx
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Sign up for Free Newsletter
  • Print Edition
    • Get Home Delivery
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
    • Advertise
    • Customer Support
    • Submit A News Tip
    • Where’s My Paper?
  • Manage HV1 Account
Hudson Valley One
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Log In
No Result
View All Result
Hudson Valley One
No Result
View All Result

Winslow Homer, painter

by Paul Smart
June 22, 2020
in Village Voices
0
Old Mother West Wind

West Wind by Winslow Homer

On June 7, 1871, the New York Evening Post announced that “Winslow Homer will spend the summer among the Catskills.” One of the nation’s prominent artists of his day, known primarily for his illustration work for Harpers Magazine that had begun with work submitted from the battlefronts of the Civil War, Homer was an established Greenwich Village presence who would make notable sketching visits to dramatic terrains for subject matter. Before the Catskills, he’d painted in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, along the New Jersey coast, and started a series of sketches, watercolors and paintings in the Adirondack wilderness.

After visiting a patron with a summer home in Walden, in Orange County, he took to renting rooms with a painter friend in a boarding house on the Esopus Creek in the Ulster County hamlet of Hurley. Homer returned to Hurley repeatedly over the next five years, with side trips – and stays – in the Greene County communities of Catskill, Leeds and Palenville.

The painter gained fame for his images of men and women in the sun-dappled breeze of the Jersey shore, playing croquet in sylvan settings, and other leisurely pursuits that moved his reputation beyond his somber works of war and its aftermath. In the Catskills and Hudson Valley, he captured the Americana of rural childhoods, courtships, and leisurely farm days.

“He is a genuine painter; that is, to see, and to reproduce what he sees, is his only care; to think, to imagine, to select, to refine, to compose, to drop into any of the intellectual tricks with which other people sometimes try to eke out the dull pictorial vision – all this Mr. Homer triumphantly avoids,” wrote Henry James in an 1875 review of a New York exhibit.

Some have noticed the reoccurrence of a young woman in the painter’s work from his time in our area. Some have written of his unrequited love for a younger society woman, carried in brief, heartfelt letters, and in his appearances at her own summer stays in the area during that time.

That woman married a poet/editor and Winslow Homer stopped visiting Hurley, finished up a final series of romantic works depicting a sadder vision of love from a farm he’d visit near Storm King, and then went back southward to visit and paint former slaves working the Virginia fields where he’d earlier painted battle scenes.

When Homer summered on an island in the bay off Gloucester, Massachusetts, he found himself drawn to the sea. He hunted and fished in the Adirondacks and the Caribbean. The settings for his paintings grew more dramatic. He spent a season on the raw coastline of northern England, creating watercolors of the sailors’ wives who looked to the horizon for their lost partners, and of the men who’d pull each other in from savage shipwrecks.

Those later works of the artist soared towards modernism, growing more and more abstract as the painter settled into a home on the Maine coast mesmerized by the power of wind, waves, and the tumult of nature’s ways. These settings served to simplify his un-self-conscious approach to a greater degree of abstraction, He achieved a depth of observation that’s kept his calmly observant aesthetic contemporary to this day.

Read more installments of Village Voices by Paul Smart.

Tags: Paul Smart Village Voices
Thank you for reading Hudson Valley One. We rely on your support to continue providing local, substantive news. Please check out our subscription options to keep local journalism alive in the Hudson Valley.
- Geddy Sveikauskas, Publisher
Previous Post

Sounds of the past’s future

Next Post

Memoirs of a hippie childhood

Paul Smart

Related Posts

Village Voices are on hold
Village Voices

Village Voices are on hold

November 17, 2020
A liberal education
Village Voices

Keeping it all together

August 24, 2020
Writing about oneself
Village Voices

I need a day off

August 24, 2020
Saugerties initiative combating addiction and suicide adds more events
Village Voices

Time travel

August 24, 2020
Where to buy face masks locally
Village Voices

A story of three states

September 2, 2020
The kids talk politics
Village Voices

Stories on the ballot

August 23, 2020
Next Post
Memoirs of a hippie childhood

Memoirs of a hippie childhood

Trending News

  • AutoCamp Catskills brings fleet of Airstreams to former Saugerties KOA 1.4k views
  • Homeless in Woodstock doc draws crowd as officials seek answers 1.2k views
  • Small freedom convoy makes its way through the streets of Saugerties  1k views
  • Saugerties highway department saving with oil and chip road surfacing 755 views
  • New Paltz highway money mystery 592 views







Latest HV1 Podcast

Weather

Kingston
◉
79°
Partly Cloudy
5:22am8:35pm EDT
Feels like: 81°F
Wind: 5mph NW
Humidity: 59%
Pressure: 29.9"Hg
UV index: 7
TueWedThu
79/55°F
84/59°F
86/63°F
Weather forecast Kingston, New York ▸

Ulster County COVID-19 Active Cases

Subscribe

Independent. Local. Substantive. Subscribe now.

  • Subscribe & Support
  • Sign up for Free Newsletter
  • Print Edition
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
  • Manage HV1 Account

© 2022 Ulster Publishing

No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Contact Us
    • Customer Support
    • Advertise
    • Submit A News Tip
  • Print Edition
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
    • Where’s My Paper
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Log In

© 2022 Ulster Publishing