Winslow Homer: American Passage

In this compelling biography, William R. Cross chronicles the life story of the great painter and illustrator Winslow Homer, who captured America in the crucible of the Civil War and contributed to shaping American identity to this day.

In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw in his hometown of Boston, showing Frederick Douglass speaking about freedom and a crowd of abolitionists being thrown from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.” He is at the heart of the image, face turned skyward and right arm reaching out like a Roman orator.

Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. Nonetheless, he spent his life capturing scenes that were distinctively, quintessentially American. Whether in pencil, watercolor, or 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 contemporary Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, the American everyman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His is the story of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved his style and adapted to the restless spirit of new invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross, a deeply insightful scholar and curator of Homer’s work, reveals the man behind the images: the life, led on the front lines of American history, that enabled Homer to create pivotal monuments of American culture.