拍品专文
How Many Eggs? is among Winslow Homer's earliest masterworks in the medium of watercolor. Executed in 1873, the same year he first began painting in the medium, How Many Eggs? exemplifies the qualities for which all of Homer's watercolors are appreciated--directness of observation and vigorous, clear design.
Homer painted How Many Eggs? during the summer of 1873 while living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His work from this period often included subject matter that celebrated carefree, rural childhood, which was portrayed within a composition filled with a clear sense of light and atmosphere. This latter quality is particularly noteworthy in How Many Eggs? and was noticed by the author Henry James, who later said, "he naturally sees everything at one with its envelope of light and air."
How Many Eggs? displays the bright, rich palette that is typical of many of Homer's finest watercolors from the summer of 1873. In this early period of the artist's development in watercolor, Homer had a freer and bolder attitude toward color than in his oils of the same time. The brilliant blue sky contrasts with the rust-oranges, pale browns and yellows--these warm tones radiate the warmth of the sun shining on the back of the young boy as he climbs the bank of a sand dune searching for eggs.
During the summer of 1873, Homer explored themes for which he would always be celebrated. H. Cooper has written, "Throughout the 1870s, Homer's subject matter embodied the ideal of simple and reassuring pleasures in union with nature itself. The Gloucester watercolors expanded on a theme Homer had touched on only occasionally in his paintings--that of rural childhood . . . At Gloucester, and for some years afterward, children figured prominently in his compositions . . . No stage of life was so exalted in nineteenth-century art and literature, especially after the Civil War, as childhood. Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain enjoyed great success with, respectively, Little Women (1868) and Tom Sawyer (1876) . . . Homer's paintings such as Snap the Whip (1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the dozens of Gloucester watercolors reinvent childhood, merging nostalgia for his own boyhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with memories of a bygone world of warmth, trust, and shared experiences." (Winslow Homer Watercolors, Washington, DC, pp. 25-6)
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer.
Homer painted How Many Eggs? during the summer of 1873 while living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His work from this period often included subject matter that celebrated carefree, rural childhood, which was portrayed within a composition filled with a clear sense of light and atmosphere. This latter quality is particularly noteworthy in How Many Eggs? and was noticed by the author Henry James, who later said, "he naturally sees everything at one with its envelope of light and air."
How Many Eggs? displays the bright, rich palette that is typical of many of Homer's finest watercolors from the summer of 1873. In this early period of the artist's development in watercolor, Homer had a freer and bolder attitude toward color than in his oils of the same time. The brilliant blue sky contrasts with the rust-oranges, pale browns and yellows--these warm tones radiate the warmth of the sun shining on the back of the young boy as he climbs the bank of a sand dune searching for eggs.
During the summer of 1873, Homer explored themes for which he would always be celebrated. H. Cooper has written, "Throughout the 1870s, Homer's subject matter embodied the ideal of simple and reassuring pleasures in union with nature itself. The Gloucester watercolors expanded on a theme Homer had touched on only occasionally in his paintings--that of rural childhood . . . At Gloucester, and for some years afterward, children figured prominently in his compositions . . . No stage of life was so exalted in nineteenth-century art and literature, especially after the Civil War, as childhood. Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain enjoyed great success with, respectively, Little Women (1868) and Tom Sawyer (1876) . . . Homer's paintings such as Snap the Whip (1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the dozens of Gloucester watercolors reinvent childhood, merging nostalgia for his own boyhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with memories of a bygone world of warmth, trust, and shared experiences." (Winslow Homer Watercolors, Washington, DC, pp. 25-6)
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer.