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| Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation | 
 enlarge | Author: Elizabeth Johns
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $36.00
You Save: $9.00 (20%)
Buy New/Used from $19.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  (2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 615095
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 8.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0520227255
Dewey Decimal Number: 759.13
EAN: 9780520227255
ASIN: 0520227255
Publication Date: November 4, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
With close analysis of Homer's art and of the personal challenges he faced throughout his life, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation is the most comprehensive study to date of the relationship between the artist's work and the psychological stages of his life. Elizabeth Johns uses theories advanced by Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson to look at Homer's evolution as a painter and a person within the context of the continuing dynamics of his family. Her incisive and absorbing readings of the artist's work take into account the developmental stages of young, middle, and late adulthood, analyzing what Homer painted at the various turning points in his life. With this psychosocial approach, Johns examines the wood-engraved illustrations of Homer's early career in relationship to the values of his family; his images of the Civil War in the context of his young manhood; his paintings of the social scene and young women's place in it in connection with his own potential for marriage; his images of fisherwomen at Cullercoats and fishermen at Prout's Neck as they relate to his interior vision during middle age; and his intrigue with the sea in his late works as an identification with the larger processes of the universe. With more than seventy-five black-and-white illustrations and forty color plates of arresting images by this American master, Winslow Homer takes into account all available documentation, including the rich trove of the artist's correspondence at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and his entire body of work-illustrations for wood engravings, watercolors, and oils. 40 color illustrations, 77 b/w photographs
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| Customer Reviews:
Winslow Homer March 9, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is one of the most instructive books on painting that I have read. I could understand the concepts so well. Now I hope I can make use of them. Beautiful!
Insightful Adjunct to the Art of Winslow Homer November 25, 2005
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Considered by most art historians to be one of the more important American artists, Winslow Homer was essentially self-taught and that fact informs his prolific span of works as much from the progressive technical maturity of his paintings and drawings as from the intuitive approach to his subjects that, at time, 'over-schooling' can flatten.
Elizabeth Johns has written an engrossing study of how Homer's life and psychological development are evident in the various stages of his work. Never cloying or intrusive in demeanor, Johns intertwines facts gleaned from correspondence and from criticism and Homer's responses to same to paint her own portrait of a man at odds with the world in some ways and in other ways as an integral observer of such phenomena as his passion for the sea.
Johns' writing is so facile that the book could comfortably exist without illustration, but add to the power of her writing the fine reproductions of both black and white and richly colored plates of Homer's paintings and this becomes a book that will satisfy even those who have questioned Homer's importance in American art history. A fine read. Grady Harp, November 05
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