拍品专文
With its light-filled composition depicting children gathering strawberries, The Strawberry Bed exemplifies Winslow Homer's genre paintings from the mid to late 1860s. Like many other American painters and writers, Homer found in childhood themes a fertile source of inspiration. Nicolai Cikovsky has written, "For Homer and other American artists in the late 1860s, however, childhood was something more than an object of nostalgic longing. By the middle of the nineteenth century the condition of childhood became, as it would remain well into the twentieth century, a chief figuration of modernist inspiration and renewal. The American Pre-Raphaelite Clarence Cook wrote in 1863, 'Childish simplicity and ignorance in matters of Art,... and perceptions naturally direct and true' were most pure in American art. Genius,' Baudelaire wrote a little earlier, was 'childhood recovered at will.' Following a long discussion of Homer's paintings in the 1870 Academy exhibition, a critic observed, 'An artist is a being in whom the primitive man is not wholly dead' and 'the child of nature lives in the artist,' endowing him with fresh, unpracticed touch of the child and its visual innocence--" (Winslow Homer, Washington, DC, 1995, p. 64).
Like many other genre paintings from this period in Homer's career, The Strawberry Bed relates to a wood engraving. The Strawberry Bed was used in Our Young Folks, a popular illustrated magazine for children, in the July 1868 issue. (figure a.) While the compositions of the two images are nearly identical, one can see in the oil painting a fuller, more highly developed sense of finish. Whereas the wood engraving was intended for a popular audience, the oil painting bears the hallmarks of Homer's love of light and color. Touches of red seen in the baskets of berries animate the foreground and is echoed in the red shirt of the figure in the right distance. The open landscape suggests a sense of freedom and independence. The work of gathering strawberries is not intensive labor, but rather an afternoon spent in the summer sunshine.
Lloyd Goodrich has written, "The sentimentality with which most artists of the time pictured children was refreshingly absent. Homer's boys were no little angels but healthy children full of energy and adventurousness. He never condescended to them. He himself was still a boy who had continued into manhood the tastes of his own country boyhood. There was no sickly nostalgia in this; he was not mourning his lost childhood but picturing with gusto the things that made childhood memorable--the child's love of nature, his joy in freedom and adventure. It was life as a boy saw and felt it, painted with a man's grasp of actuality. The work had an early morning freshness; work was play, a day's fishing a delight, being snowbound pure joy. Not that these feelings were openly expressed, for his method remained objective. But this very matter-of-factness, this concern with things rather than emotions, kept him close to the boy's viewpoint. Rarely has such sympathy with childhood been united with such utter unsentimentality. Yet with all their homely naturalism these works were deeply lyrical. They expressed the grave poetry of childhood with tenderness all the more moving for being so well concealed. (Winslow Homer, New York, 1944, p. 29)
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonn of the works of Winslow Homer.
Like many other genre paintings from this period in Homer's career, The Strawberry Bed relates to a wood engraving. The Strawberry Bed was used in Our Young Folks, a popular illustrated magazine for children, in the July 1868 issue. (figure a.) While the compositions of the two images are nearly identical, one can see in the oil painting a fuller, more highly developed sense of finish. Whereas the wood engraving was intended for a popular audience, the oil painting bears the hallmarks of Homer's love of light and color. Touches of red seen in the baskets of berries animate the foreground and is echoed in the red shirt of the figure in the right distance. The open landscape suggests a sense of freedom and independence. The work of gathering strawberries is not intensive labor, but rather an afternoon spent in the summer sunshine.
Lloyd Goodrich has written, "The sentimentality with which most artists of the time pictured children was refreshingly absent. Homer's boys were no little angels but healthy children full of energy and adventurousness. He never condescended to them. He himself was still a boy who had continued into manhood the tastes of his own country boyhood. There was no sickly nostalgia in this; he was not mourning his lost childhood but picturing with gusto the things that made childhood memorable--the child's love of nature, his joy in freedom and adventure. It was life as a boy saw and felt it, painted with a man's grasp of actuality. The work had an early morning freshness; work was play, a day's fishing a delight, being snowbound pure joy. Not that these feelings were openly expressed, for his method remained objective. But this very matter-of-factness, this concern with things rather than emotions, kept him close to the boy's viewpoint. Rarely has such sympathy with childhood been united with such utter unsentimentality. Yet with all their homely naturalism these works were deeply lyrical. They expressed the grave poetry of childhood with tenderness all the more moving for being so well concealed. (Winslow Homer, New York, 1944, p. 29)
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonn of the works of Winslow Homer.