Lot Essay
Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth is a virtuoso example of Winslow Homer's celebrated painting technique in watercolor. In style and subject matter, the work exemplifies the artist's finest work in the medium. During the decade of the 1870s just prior to his trip to Cullercoats, England from 1881 to 1882, Homer had concentrated his efforts on genre painting--depictions of children and young women set in bucolic surroundings. In Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth Homer continues this theme, painting two young women carrying baskets and standing on a sandbar. Helen Cooper has noted the links between Homer's watercolors of the late 1870s and those completed in England such as Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth: "There is a psychological parallel between the children of his earlier works and the Cullercoats people. The simplicity and naturalness that characterize the children were also the perceived characteristics of the fisher people. Both groups had become symbols of life lived close to nature--serious, concise, and true--and free of the insincerities and complications of modern urban society." (Winslow Homer Watercolors, Washington, DC, 1986, p. 98)
Homer's extended visit to Cullercoats proved to be a critical turning point in the artist's career. During this period he concentrated on works on paper, creating numerous watercolors and drawings. As seen in Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth, Homer chose as subject matter members of the local fishing community that populated this small village on England's northeast coast. Homer was captivated by the residents of Cullercoats as they went about the daily activities that comprised their livelihood--carrying baskets laden with fish, hauling fishing boats up and down the beach, and watching the ever-changing weather patterns of the sea.
Franklin Kelly writes, "During his time in Cullercoats Homer documented virtually every activity that occupied the time of the fisher women; he and his sketchbook must have become a familiar presence wherever the women went--along the breakwater, on the beach, on top of the cliffs, and in the streets and back alleys. In the watercolors he executed while in the village he always paid careful attention to the details of their dress and to the specific nature of their activities." ("Process of Change," Winslow Homer, Washington, DC, 1995, pp. 181-182)
Homer has painted the young girls in Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth dressed in clothing typical of England's northeast coast. Barefooted, the girls wear quilted skirts and tight-fitting bodices and they have wrapped colorful kerchiefs around their necks and heads. The figures look out across the water into the distance. Though they appear as young girls, Homer has painted them with a monumental quality that suggests a more serious tone. Behind them the fishing fleet is laid up along the water's edge, attended to by other members of the fishing community. Further in the distance more fishing boats ply the coast, their sails silhouetted on the light-filled horizon.
Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth retains the vivid colors and delicately toned washes that typify Homer's finest works watercolors. The artist has limited the overall palette to cool grays and blues--seen in the figures' skirts, the distant shore, and the sky and reflections in the foreground. He has enlivened this subtle coloring with brilliant touches of red--seen in the girl's kerchief, on the central basket, and on a few figures in the distance. The entire composition is unified by Homer's careful observation of light and atmosphere. The artist has modulated the washes in the sky to suggest a clearing storm with sunlight filling the horizon with bright, clear light. In the reflection in the foreground--one of the most accomplished passages in any watercolor by the artist--the brilliant blue sky sparkles with reflected light and with reflections of the girls' skirts and baskets.
To formulate the figures Homer first carefully drew in pencil and subsequently painted the delicate washes that are the hallmark of his mature watercolor technique. The sky, sandbar and reflection in the foreground are rendered with transparent washes that add depth and density to the composition. The watery application of these washes anticipates the brilliant watercolors that Homer would create a decade later in the North Woods and in the Tropics.
When Homer's Cullercoats watercolors were first exhibited, critics received them with considerable praise. Franklin Kelly has noted, "When a selection of these first English watercolors went on view in Boston in February 1882, reviewers responded positively to his portrayal of the women. 'They deal with the humble life and vocation of the fisher woman, a class whose picturesque costumes and sturdy characteristics afford an attractive theme,' observed the Boston Advertiser. 'Mr. Homer seems to have observed the fish-wives of the little seaside town unusually closely,' wrote the critic for the Transcript; 'his women all over in the way they stand, sit, hold their hands, use their back and shoulders in carrying weights, such as baskets of fish and the like.'" (Winslow Homer, p. 201)
Of Homer's most ambitious Cullercoats watercolors such as Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth, Franklin Kelly writes, "Homer almost always sets up [an] emphatic juxtaposition between the realm of women (the shore) and that of men (the sea), charging them with suggestive symbolism. . . Even when the men are no longer physically on shore with the women. . . their presence is still indicated by the boats... And it is this same duality of men and women who are at once united through their shared inextricable links to, and dependence on, the sea, but separated by their inevitably different relationships to it, that is at the heart of [these] works of Homer's English experience." (Winslow Homer, pp. 181-182)
This watercolor will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer.
Homer's extended visit to Cullercoats proved to be a critical turning point in the artist's career. During this period he concentrated on works on paper, creating numerous watercolors and drawings. As seen in Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth, Homer chose as subject matter members of the local fishing community that populated this small village on England's northeast coast. Homer was captivated by the residents of Cullercoats as they went about the daily activities that comprised their livelihood--carrying baskets laden with fish, hauling fishing boats up and down the beach, and watching the ever-changing weather patterns of the sea.
Franklin Kelly writes, "During his time in Cullercoats Homer documented virtually every activity that occupied the time of the fisher women; he and his sketchbook must have become a familiar presence wherever the women went--along the breakwater, on the beach, on top of the cliffs, and in the streets and back alleys. In the watercolors he executed while in the village he always paid careful attention to the details of their dress and to the specific nature of their activities." ("Process of Change," Winslow Homer, Washington, DC, 1995, pp. 181-182)
Homer has painted the young girls in Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth dressed in clothing typical of England's northeast coast. Barefooted, the girls wear quilted skirts and tight-fitting bodices and they have wrapped colorful kerchiefs around their necks and heads. The figures look out across the water into the distance. Though they appear as young girls, Homer has painted them with a monumental quality that suggests a more serious tone. Behind them the fishing fleet is laid up along the water's edge, attended to by other members of the fishing community. Further in the distance more fishing boats ply the coast, their sails silhouetted on the light-filled horizon.
Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth retains the vivid colors and delicately toned washes that typify Homer's finest works watercolors. The artist has limited the overall palette to cool grays and blues--seen in the figures' skirts, the distant shore, and the sky and reflections in the foreground. He has enlivened this subtle coloring with brilliant touches of red--seen in the girl's kerchief, on the central basket, and on a few figures in the distance. The entire composition is unified by Homer's careful observation of light and atmosphere. The artist has modulated the washes in the sky to suggest a clearing storm with sunlight filling the horizon with bright, clear light. In the reflection in the foreground--one of the most accomplished passages in any watercolor by the artist--the brilliant blue sky sparkles with reflected light and with reflections of the girls' skirts and baskets.
To formulate the figures Homer first carefully drew in pencil and subsequently painted the delicate washes that are the hallmark of his mature watercolor technique. The sky, sandbar and reflection in the foreground are rendered with transparent washes that add depth and density to the composition. The watery application of these washes anticipates the brilliant watercolors that Homer would create a decade later in the North Woods and in the Tropics.
When Homer's Cullercoats watercolors were first exhibited, critics received them with considerable praise. Franklin Kelly has noted, "When a selection of these first English watercolors went on view in Boston in February 1882, reviewers responded positively to his portrayal of the women. 'They deal with the humble life and vocation of the fisher woman, a class whose picturesque costumes and sturdy characteristics afford an attractive theme,' observed the Boston Advertiser. 'Mr. Homer seems to have observed the fish-wives of the little seaside town unusually closely,' wrote the critic for the Transcript; 'his women all over in the way they stand, sit, hold their hands, use their back and shoulders in carrying weights, such as baskets of fish and the like.'" (Winslow Homer, p. 201)
Of Homer's most ambitious Cullercoats watercolors such as Two Girls on the Beach, Tynemouth, Franklin Kelly writes, "Homer almost always sets up [an] emphatic juxtaposition between the realm of women (the shore) and that of men (the sea), charging them with suggestive symbolism. . . Even when the men are no longer physically on shore with the women. . . their presence is still indicated by the boats... And it is this same duality of men and women who are at once united through their shared inextricable links to, and dependence on, the sea, but separated by their inevitably different relationships to it, that is at the heart of [these] works of Homer's English experience." (Winslow Homer, pp. 181-182)
This watercolor will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer.