Winslow Homer: American Passage PDF Download Free

Attributes of Winslow Homer: American Passage PDF

The definitive life of the painter who forged American identity visually, in art and illustration, with an impact comparable to that of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in poetry and prose―yet whose own story has remained largely untold. Winslow Homer: American Passage PDF

In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.”

Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. He created multivalent visual tales, both quintessentially American and quietly replete with narrative for and about people of all races and ages. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning.

Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today.

Includes Color Images and Maps

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Illustrations of Winslow Homer: American Passage PDF

As difficult as innovation is today. Winslow Homer: American Passage pdf is a text that is present in the form of inspiration that will broaden the minds beyond what an artist or photographer can see. This is one of the masterpieces that is recommended by all the great artists to be changing their visualization of the world of today. In the minds of someone that truly appreciates what this text has to offer lies the secret of changing the way everyone lives in this world. Art is the most influential subject of today’s world and at all times has it been the foundation stone for change in this universe we live in. A must read and learn for all artist and especially photographers.

The Writers

William R. Cross is an independent scholar and a consultant to art and history museums. He served as the curator of Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869–1880, a nationally renowned 2019 exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum on the formation of Winslow Homer as a marine painter. He is the chairman of the advisory board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Cross and his wife, Ellen, the parents of two grown sons, live on Cape Ann, north of Boston, Massachusetts.

Proportions of Winslow Homer: American Passage PDF

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 12, 2022)
  Language ‏ : ‎ English
  Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
  International Standard Book Number-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374603790
  International Standard Book Number-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374603793
  Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.6 ounces
  Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.55 x 1.55 x 9.55 inches
  Best Sellers Rank: #40,219 in Books

Reviews From Customers

zunirah
A feast of facts
April 16, 2022

A feast of facts

Like all fans of Winslow Homer, I had great expectations for William R. Cross’s “Winslow Homer: American Passage.” Sad to say, those expectations shriveled and shrank from the very first pages. Clearly, Cross has scoured the archives and vacuumed up bags full of incidentals, which usefully fill in some of the many blanks in Homer’s life and career. Yet at the same time, he fails to break new ground. In essence, and despite the book’s claim that Homer’s story remains largely untold, Cross traces the same lines of the artist’s life and work as very many have before, only he pads his version with an absolute glut of “filler”—an extravagant barrage of extraneous details, including the biographies of everyone Homer may have been even casually acquainted with, and mini-histories of just about anything of historical significance or insignificance that happened in the artist’s vicinity.

Cross’s readings and interpretations of Homer’s paintings and work in other media are competent but for the most part pedestrian. He latches on to the Golden Section—a classical system of geometric proportion—and points out Homer’s compositional schemes with relish, telling us, for instance, that the horizontal centerline in “The Fox Hunt” “neatly decapitates” the fox. Less work for the crows!

The book is littered with clichéd turns of phrase, for example: “. . . the particularities of mid-ocean wreck and rescue became seeds from which mighty trees would grow.” And: Homer’s flatmate “had kept the home fires burning for him.” And: the “pure streams and brisk air of the Adirondacks would prove as essential to Winslow’s vigor and purpose as breath itself,” and so on.

Cross tends as well to drag in Old and New Masters, presumably to aggrandize Homer’s greatness still more. The hand of a drowning sailor in “The Ship’s Boat,” Cross suggests, resembles one in a 1654 etching by Rembrandt. Or: one of Homer’s Cullercoats oils is composed “so boldly that one almost suspects it of being a Rothko canvas turned ninety degrees.” Well, OK, if you say so! Cross drops contemporaries’ names with abandon, too, hazarding that Homer must have had deep conversations with Boston ophthalmologist Henry Angell, hung out in Newport with William and Henry James, and even got chummy with Theodore Roosevelt—all without a shred of supporting evidence, leaving us to wonder where and how Cross uncovered these supposed connections.

Cross seems to pride himself on portraying Homer as a nuanced, complicated, empathetic, spiritual, and sensitive creator, yet for the most part, his Homer is still the same old familiar Homer of the twentieth century, when critics and scholars alike sang loudly in praise of the painter as an authentically all-American original, a manly art hero and uncompromising individualist who, as Cross declares, “painted as Whitman and Twain wrote.” Oh, and let’s add Emily Dickinson to that masculine literary duo: occasionally, Cross quotes lines and whole poems by the Belle of Amherst because Dickinson, who in all likelihood had little or no knowledge of Homer, somehow, perhaps telepathically, “understood what Homer did.”

Cross’s biography of Winslow Homer will be of value to scholars mostly as an abundant mine of information and sources (except for the ones Cross doesn’t bother to reveal). It is beautifully produced and handsomely illustrated. It is a good-enough introduction to Homer, but Cross offers no major new discoveries here, no challenging new insights. In the end, this is less a rereading of Homer than a retread.
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Prof. Bruce Herman
Poignant, revealing portrait of the artist
April 26, 2022

William Cross undertakes the daunting task of chronicling Winslow Homer’s vanishing tracks in the sand–and achieves a compelling portrait of a notoriously private, elusive American painter –– one who ought to be a household name like his contemporaries Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.
Cross assiduously records the odyssey of this centrally important American voice of the 19th century, showing how Homer placed himself and his brush consistently at the intersection of the some of the most fraught aspects of our life together––the Civil War and the plight of the post-Reconstruction Black community––with empathy and insight, leaving space for us to complete the story with our own eyes and memory and imagination.
The biographer employs careful analysis of Homer’s upbringing by a staunch abolitionist mother along with the tensions of the mercantile world of his father and brothers––creating a complex narrative around this seminal painter’s growth and development over six decades of sustained effort to achieve a lasting American legacy.
Well written and insightfully presented–a powerful addition to the literature surrounding this uniquely American passage.

Rachael
Cheap “perfect” binding. Coated paper has a strong chemical smell.
April 18, 2022

I am a Homer fan and looked forward to receiving this book. I was disappointed to see the publisher used the “perfect” binding method that is used in paperbacks. In perfect bindings pages are glued directly into the spine. The effect is that you have to struggle to keep the book open. Over time the glue dries and pages fall out. In contrast, sewn folded signature bindings (once the hardcover standard but disappearing fast) allow the book to open flatter for easier reading. Also, the coated paper has a strong, nauseating chemical smell. Do publishers look at (or smell) the products they make???
The book information page does not say that acid-free paper was used. Homer’s watercolors, painted on cotton paper, will outlive this book by many years.

Martin
Profusely illustrated bio of great American painter and illustrator of 19th century America
May 11, 2022

This detailed biography or American artist Winslow Homer combines his life and art with many aspects of American life from before the Civil War to the early 20th century. Fascinating look at a great American life and great American art.

James
all I knew of Homer prior to this book were shadows…
May 24, 2022

Homer lived on and studied littoral settings. So also, his own story was in silhouette till Cross penetrated the coastline of Maine to lead us into the inner reaches of the man!

Christian Schlect
VINE VOICE
A Triple
April 19, 2022

After admiring, over the years, several works of Winslow Homer, this is the first book devoted to the life of this American painter that I have read. I enjoyed it and leaned much.

Since Homer, a loner, did not write much (no diary, few letters), William R. Cross focuses on his subject’s extended family and friends, his travels, and, most centrally, on his individual creations. I especially liked that many of the works analyzed by Mr. Cross are pictured nearby in the text.

The book’s value is heightened by detailed and informative end notes. (Mr. Cross is obviously a lover of the obscure fact.)

If you have a section devoted to art books, “Winslow Homer: American Passage” deserves your purchase.

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