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The Lone Boat, North Woods Club, Adirondacks
Winslow Homer (American, 1836-1910)
1892
- Medium
- Watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, over traces of graphite, on thick, rough-textured, ivory wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 38.5 × 54.4 cm (15 3/16 × 21 7/16 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The Lone Boat, North Woods Club, Adirondacks speaks powerfully of the fisherman’s communion with nature. The medium of watercolor offered the perfect metaphor as well as technical means to express this relationship; its very wetness allows the forms of man and nature to run together, absorbed by the hazy atmosphere. In The Lone Boat, Homer constructed a nearly abstract composition along a strong horizon line, with the trees on the shore and their reflections in the water forming a symmetrical design. The effect is similar to that achieved when a still-wet sheet is folded at the center and blotted.
Homer painted the sky using multiple hues and a complex array of techniques, including resist, blotting, scraping, and wet-into-wet brushwork. The resulting textures and contrasts create a strong sense of movement, of clouds accumulating and dispersing while light shifts and changes across their forms.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
