Lot Essay
During the summer of 1878, Winslow Homer lived at Houghton Farm, the country home of a family friend in Mountainville, New York. Enjoying the pleasant surroundings outside of New York City, Homer devoted himself to watercolors and to painting en plein-air. Helen A. Cooper has written, "in America during the late 1860s and 1870s there was a marked increase in paintings of farm scenes, including those by Homer himself." (Winslow Homer Watercolors, Washington, DC, 1986, p. 55)
While Homer devoted much of his summer to painting young girls as shepherdesses, In Horse and Plowman, Houghton Farm, he explored the great agrarian ideal whose values were at the heart of American life during the nineteenth century. "Watercolors of men plowing and boys driving cows to pasture were plain rustic realism without a trace of fancy dress...the contrast between [these pictures] and the shepherdess pictures...reveals a fundamental split in his aims at this time--between the masculine and the feminine in subject, and between direct naturalism and a conventionalized style." (L. Goodrich, Winslow Homer, New York, 1944, pp. 64-65)
Cooper has noted that Homer's watercolors from this period, including Horse and Plowman, Houghton Farm, are characterized by "freer brushwork, more simplified details, clearer color, and more developed sense of atmosphere and light." (Winslow Homer Watercolors, p. 55) Horse and Plowman, Houghton Farm gives the viewer a sense of the environment that so inspired Homer that summer and for the years to come.
This work will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer.
While Homer devoted much of his summer to painting young girls as shepherdesses, In Horse and Plowman, Houghton Farm, he explored the great agrarian ideal whose values were at the heart of American life during the nineteenth century. "Watercolors of men plowing and boys driving cows to pasture were plain rustic realism without a trace of fancy dress...the contrast between [these pictures] and the shepherdess pictures...reveals a fundamental split in his aims at this time--between the masculine and the feminine in subject, and between direct naturalism and a conventionalized style." (L. Goodrich, Winslow Homer, New York, 1944, pp. 64-65)
Cooper has noted that Homer's watercolors from this period, including Horse and Plowman, Houghton Farm, are characterized by "freer brushwork, more simplified details, clearer color, and more developed sense of atmosphere and light." (Winslow Homer Watercolors, p. 55) Horse and Plowman, Houghton Farm gives the viewer a sense of the environment that so inspired Homer that summer and for the years to come.
This work will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer.