The Lone Boat, North Woods Club, Adirondacks
1892
Medium
Watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, over traces of graphite, on thick, rough-textured, ivory wove paper
Dimensions
38.5 × 54.4 cm (15 3/16 × 21 7/16 in.)
Classification
watercolor
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
16797
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
The Lone Boat, North Woods Club, Adirondacks speaks powerfully of the fisherman’s communion with nature. The medium of watercolor offered the perfect metaphor as well as technical means to express this relationship; its very wetness allows the forms of man and nature to run together, absorbed by the hazy atmosphere. In The Lone Boat, Homer constructed a nearly abstract composition along a strong horizon line, with the trees on the shore and their reflections in the water forming a symmetrical de...
About the Artist
Winslow Homer · 1836–1910
Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was one of America's greatest painters and a preeminent figure in 19th-century American art. Largely self-taught, Homer began his career as a commercial illustrator and Civil War correspondent for Harper's Weekly before becoming renowned for his powerful marine subjects and landscape paintings. His mastery of both oil and watercolor, combined with his uncompromising reali...