Homer's luminous watercolors and outdoor portraits are some of the most recognizable works in art history. This collection paints Homer as an integral part of the New York art scene who both embraced, and challenged, the American aesthetic of art. Color illustrations.

George Inness (1825-94), long considered one of America's greatest landscape painters, has yet to receive his full due from scholars and critics. A complicated artist and thinker, Inness painted stunningly beautiful, evocative views of the American countryside. Less interested in representing the details of a particular place than in rendering the "subjective mystery of nature," Inness believed that capturing the spirit or essence of a natural scene could point to a reality beyond the physical or, as Inness put it, "the reality of the unseen." Throughout his career, Inness struggled to make visible what was invisible to the human eye by combining a deep interest in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry—including optics, psychology, physiology, and mathematics—with an idiosyncratic brand of mysticism. Rachael Ziady DeLue's George Inness and the Science of Landscape—the first in-depth examination of Inness's career to appear in several decades—demonstrates how the artistic, spiritual, and scientific aspects of Inness's art found expression in his masterful landscapes. In fact, Inness's practice was not merely shaped by his preoccupation with the nature and limits of human perception; he conceived of his labor as a science in its own right. This lavishly illustrated work reveals Inness as profoundly invested in the science and philosophy of his time and illuminates the complex manner in which the fields of art and science intersected in nineteenth-century America. Long-awaited, this reevaluation of one of the major figures of nineteenth-century American art will prove to be a seminal text in the fields of art history and American studies.

The definitive life of the painter who forged American identity visually, in art and illustration, with an impact comparable to that of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in poetry and prose—yet whose own story has remained largely untold. In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.” Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. He created multivalent visual tales, both quintessentially American and quietly replete with narrative for and about people of all races and ages. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning. Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today. Includes Color Images and Maps

68 treasures of Massachusetts museum: Homer, Sargent, Cassatt, Inness, Remington in depth.

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.

The fascinating story of the transformation of American watercolor practice between 1866 and 1925 The formation of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 by a small, dedicated group of painters transformed the perception of what had long been considered a marginal medium. Artists of all ages, styles, and backgrounds took up watercolor in the 1870s, inspiring younger generations of impressionists and modernists. By the 1920s many would claim it as "the American medium." This engaging and comprehensive book tells the definitive story of the metamorphosis of American watercolor practice between 1866 and 1925, identifying the artist constituencies and social forces that drove the new popularity of the medium. The major artists of the movement - Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, William Trost Richards, Thomas Moran, Thomas Eakins, Charles Prendergast, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth, and many others - are represented with lavish color illustrations. The result is a fresh and beautiful look at watercolor's central place in American art and culture.