Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude

Pictured, A Quiet Pool on a Sunny Day (1889), by Winslow Homer.

 

Credit Karen A. and Kevin W. Kennedy Collection.

Noted artists and scholars discuss the life and work of wood-graver, illustrator and painter Winslow Homer, one of the great recluses of American art.

Winslow Homer is recognized as perhaps the greatest American painter of his time.  His work as both an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and as a painter reveals an enormous amount about American life from before the outbreak of the Civil War, through the War itself and Post –War America up to 1880. A new documentary, Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude explores the life and work of a great American artist. Episode 1 of Winslow Homer: Society and Solitude airs Friday, March 15, 2013 at 7 p.m. followed immediately by episode 2 at 8 p.m. on WXXI World (cable 524/DT21.2).

The film chronicles Homer’s artistic evolution, while also telling the story of a man who in his youth lived in the midst of a lively and cosmopolitan New York City art scene, but who gradually withdrew from public life. 

In his mid-forties he left America and lived alone in a small English fishing village for well over a year. When he returned he built a studio residence on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Maine, and lived there for the rest of his life. By the time of his death in 1910, he was mythologized as the great recluse of American art.

The documentary features more than 180 of the artist's paintings, watercolors, etchings and illustrations and extensive on-location footage of places immortalized in some of Homer's most famous works.