Winslow Homer in the Laboratory:
The Houghton Farm Watercolors, 1878
Winslow Homer (United States, 1836 - 1910), Girl Seated on Hillside Overlooking the Water, 1878, watercolor and graphite on paper, 8 3/4 x 11 5/16 inches. Gift of Lily W. Russell, 1998.28.
In the summer of 1878, with his career stalled, Winslow Homer was a visitor to Houghton Farm in Mountainville, fifty miles north of New York City. Recently purchased by the paint and varnish manufacturer Lawson Valentine, one of Homer’s patrons, the six hundred acre farm was in the process of being rebuilt according to “scientific principles.” New buildings, landscape improvements and gardens had begun to transform the property into a modern Eden: a fertile ground for the painter.
But Homer apparently had an agenda of his own. His body of work at the farm— of sheep and shepherdesses, children at work and in idleness, all point to a change in point of view, but also to a change in method. The many works from this summer, all in water-based paint, were as experimental as the farm itself, and critical to his transformation from a strictly realist painter to a more lyrical naturalist. By carefully examining the works— for clues to Homer’s methods and materials— we will see how his watercolors from the summer were the result of a change in painting practice that prepared him for his later work in both watercolor and oil.
Judith C. Walsh is Professor Emerita, SUNY Buffalo State College. She was a visiting scholar at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellows Office and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Virginia Herrick Deknatel Paper Conservation Laboratory of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has published on Winslow Homer’s watercolor techniques and spoken at the National Gallery of Art, Amon-Carter Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Hood Museum of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.