Cathy's Art Diary

Comprehensive online course from the National Gallery examining aspects of their current Winslow Homer exhibition. Over three weeks six speakers guided us through Homer’s life and work. Week one started with Chris Riopelle curator of the current show guiding us through it. I have heard him talk about it before but you learn something new each time. This was followed by John Fogg from the University of Birmingham talking about Homer’s experiences in the American Civil War and the effect on his art both during and after the war. Week two took us to Europe with Frances Varley from the Courtauld leading us through what art Homer may have seen when he was in Paris in 1866 and how it influenced his work on his return. She saw this as a period of experimentation and recovery from the Civil War. We then moved to England and his time at Cullercoats with Christine Riding from the National Gallery placing the work in the context of his whole career and in the fashion for artists to work in wo...

Evocative exhibition at the National Gallery on the life and work of Winslow Homer. Homer had come up in so many lectures I’ve done recently I was excited to see this show and it didn’t disappoint. It was beautifully presented with soft blue walls and clear labels and the pictures were nicely placed to give you space to look at them. I love his sense of reportage from the Civil War works based on his time as a journalist, through the Reconstruction period and on to the politics of the Caribbean at the end of the 19th century. The themes and images felt very current. Some fell a bit between symbolism and sentimentality. The heart of the show was his time in Cullercoats now in Tyne and Wear sketching the fishermen and their wives and their equivalent of lifeboat men. He worked these sketches up into oil paintings back in America and drew on the sketches for the rest of his career. I was lucky enough to get talking to a couple from the town at the show who were very proud of this p...

Fascinating and useful online lecture from the National Gallery on their new exhibition on Winslow Homer which opens in two days’ time. Christopher Riopelle talked us though the life of Homer using paintings which have been chosen for the show. He covered his early work in the American Civil War doing woodcuts from the front for the newspapers and how this then fed into his later career and his continued interest in taking a journalistic approach to subjects. He then looked at how he came to England in 1881 to visit the seafaring community of Cullercoats on the North East coast recording the work of the rescue crews there and the lives of the fishermen and their wives. He talked about how Homer built a collection of drawings and sketches which he drew on for the rest of his career. Finally he looked at some of the iconic paintings from Homer’s his later years and how they commented on   American life . I’m off to see the show tomorrow at a members’ preview and am really lo...

Interesting  online lecture from the Courtauld Research Forum looking at the meaning of the sea in paintings by Winslow Homer. Maggie Cao from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, took the picture “The Gulf Stream” from 1899 and used it to explore various social and political issues which Homer may have been alluding to. She referenced writing on the nature of the phenomena of the Gulf Stream and how it bought economic benefits to America, opening up trade from South America, but also conflict with the fishing disputes off Canada with the British. She also noted that it was shown shortly after the Spanish-American War. She also said the work may reference, the by then illegal, Slave Trade as it shows a black figure fighting the elements with sugar cane on the desk of the boat and sharks circling the boat. It makes the figure heroic but vulnerable. She introduced me to some beautiful pictures of sponge divers in the Bahamas and I was interest in the idea that most s...