Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Netting the Fish
Winslow Homer (American, 1836-1910)
1889
- Medium
- Transparent watercolor, heightened with opaque white watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, over graphite, on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 35.3 × 50.8 cm (13 15/16 × 20 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Olivia Shaler Swan Memorial Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
An avid angler and sportsman, Homer often depicted fishing and hunting scenes in his artwork. Many of his watercolors that explore these subjects were painted on frequent trips to the Adirondack Mountains. Netting the Fish is unusual in its focus on a gentleman sportsman. Young, well groomed, and neatly attired, the fisherman in this watercolor stands in contrast to the rustic guides featured in many of the artist’s other Adirondacks works. Homer’s fluid brushstrokes describe the smooth surface of the water, and his background washes evoke the wooded shoreline seen at a distance. Netting the Fish is one of Homer’s few grisaille, or monochrome, watercolors, painted as a study of values in preparation for the etching Fly Fishing, Saranac Lake.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
