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Winslow Homer’s earliest form of artistic training was through an apprenticeship with lithographer John Bufford when he was 19 years old. Starting from 1857, Winslow Homer had an 18-year career of producing illustrations for Harper’s Weekly. In response to the beginning of the American Civil War, in 1861 Homer was sent as a full-time artist correspondent to the front in Virginia. In addition to his job as a commercial illustrator, Homer began to explore the medium of oil painting during this time. Following the Civil War, Homer continued creating illustrations as his painting career grew. By the late 1860s he started to gain more artistic success with his watercolors, leading him to give up work as a freelance illustrator in 1875. Today, Homer is known as one of the premier American painters of the 19th century. His work encompasses a variety of themes such as landscape, marine scenes, the Civil War, and rural and domestic life, typically centered around women. Label Type
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The Bathe at Newport is a wood engraving that was published on September 4, 1858 by Harper’s Weekly. This is not a print of an engraving reproduced in Harper’s but it is actually the page (586, to be precise) removed from a copy of the periodical. The picture was printed on the backside of the international news page and directly across from another illustration by Homer, also depicting a scene of upper-class leisure. This image of a summer resort for the wealthy elite in Newport shows a crowd of people frolicing in the surf with abandon. The opposing page featured another Homer print, entitled Picnicking in the Woods, depicting similar merrymakers. The accompanying text on the following page that relates to these two pictures states, “The fortunate few who have mingled in the gay bathing parties at Newport may seek for their likenesses in the picture which represents a dip in the surf. . . . Such pictures need no text. They tell their own story.”