The Army of the Potomac — A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty

Winslow Homer (see figure 1), who created among the most breathtaking and influential images in the history of watercolor, was, famously, a man who received almost no formal artistic education. Acknowledged even in his own day as America’s most “original” and “independent” painter in watercolors, he had an intuitive rather than a tutored relationship with this challenging yet flexible medium. Between 1873 and 1905, he created nearly 700 watercolors. A staple of his livelihood, these works were …