The Veteran in a New Field

Often, of course, American fields were so cluttered with stumps that there was no question of forgetting about them for any length of time. (Figures 30 and 31.)

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 …