American Art Collaborative

Winslow Homer was born in Boston in 1836. As a young man he became an apprentice at John H. Bufford’s and Sons, lithographers, which was the beginning of a career as an illustrator for newspapers. He moved to New York in 1859, the year after Harper’s Weekly had been founded. Homer had sent illustrations to the periodical before he moved to the city, and after he arrived there he became one of its regular illustrators until 1875. His great output there was wood engravings of the Civil War period. The weekly sent him to the front, yet with few exceptions, his illustrations did not depict battle scenes but rather life in camp. In 1866 and 1867 Homer was in Paris, where he exhibited two paintings at the Universal Exposition.[1] In the early seventies he began to paint seriously in watercolor, a medium that hitherto had been, with few exceptions, the province of amateurs. Many of them were painted at Houghton Farm, a farm near West Point that belonged to Lawson Valentine, with whom the painter’s brother Charles worked. The watercolors done there were of children pursuing rural activities such as gathering berries. In 1881–82 Homer traveled to Cullercoats, a village on the North Sea of England. His sojourn produced a dramatic change in his work, especially his oils. He captured the power and danger of the sea, which he focused on after 1883, when he moved to Prouts Neck, Maine, where he died in 1910. Homer made many trips to the Adirondacks between 1870 and 1910, although he did little work there after 1900. The Trapper was painted on his first trip. It depicts a man, the trapper, standing on the trunk of a tree that has fallen into the water. Beyond him are islands, the pond, and the opposite shoreline. Placed at a slight angle in the canoe is a jack light which, when a candle or lantern was lighted in the receptacle on the pole at night, would be used to startle deer. A second version of The Trapper, called An Adirondack Lake, is in the collection of the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington. The most obvious difference, aside from its being larger (24 x 38 in.), is that the jack light is not upright in An Adirondack Lake, but rests on the edge of the canoe. They are both dated 1870; it is not known for certain which was painted first. It is known, however, that at least one occasion, in 1866, Lawson Valentine, who had become a patron of the artist, commissioned a version of a canvas that Homer had painted the previous year and that Valentine had failed to acquire.[2] Lawson Valentine as well as other members of his family were supporters of Homer, especially during the 1870s, and acquired both oils and watercolors by him. Winslow Homer’s brother Charles worked for the Valentines and eventually became chairman of the board of Valentine & Company, a successful varnishing company in New York. Lawson Valentine himself had forty works by the artist. His daughter Almira married Nathan Trowbridge Pulsifer and was the mother of Harold Trowbridge Pulsifer, who married Susan Nichols. A poet, Harold T. Pulsifer died in 1948, and his wife donated The Trapper to Colby College the next year. At the same time she placed on loan eleven works by Homer in the Valentine-Pulsifer Collection, which had been left in trust to her. Upon her death in 1987 the collection went to a niece, and most of it is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.Hugh J. Gourley III1. The museum has in its collection a painting done in Paris. It is Portrait of Pauline, 1867, oil on canvas, 22 x 15 inches, gift of Miss Adeline F. Wing and Miss Caroline R. Wing, 1962.025. Pauline sold perfume and soap at the Universal Exposition.2. The Valentine-Pulsifer painting is Army Teamsters, 1866, now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; it is based on The Bright Side, 1865, in the collection of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.