Attributed to Winslow Homer, it does not have a COA. 13 x 11 inches. Medium: watercolor paper. Please refer to photos for frame condition. Provenance: private owner.
Biography: 1836 - 1910. Winslow Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1836, the second of three sons of Henrietta Benson and Charles Savage Homer. His father, a hardware importer, and his mother, an amateur watercolorist, encouraged his early interest in art. Given that no art schools and no art institutions existed in the Boston area during Homer's youth, he, like many of his contemporaries, had to piece together his own artistic training. He began by working for the commercial lithographer John H. Bufford, an acquaintance of his father. In 1857, after two years as an apprentice to Bufford, Homer left the firm, rented a studio in the Ballou Publishing House in Boston, and launched his career as a freelance illustrator. He initially worked for Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly among other weekly magazines, and later illustrated various literary texts by celebrated authors, including the poets William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.In 1859, Homer moved to New York, where he continued to freelance for Harper's Weekly and other publications while establishing his reputation as a painter. Shortly after his arrival, he decided to further his artistic training: he enrolled in life drawing classes at the National Academy of Design and took a month of painting lessons from the French genre and landscape painter Frédéric Rondel (1826-1892). During the Civil War, he served as an artist-correspondent for Harper's Weekly, visiting the front several times and illustrating the daily routine of camp life on the Union side. His wartime experiences inspired numerous oil paintings, and critical acclaim for this work led to his 1865 election to the National Academy of Design as a full academician.Following the great success of his Civil War images, Homer took his first trip to Europe in December 1866. He spent ten months in France, sharing a studio in the Montmartre district of Paris with a friend from Massachusetts, Albert Warren Kelsey, and briefly visiting the countryside. During his stay abroad, he did not enroll in any art classes but worked on his own, completing nineteen small oil paintings and three illustrations for Harper's Weekly. His works from this period display the influence not of contemporary, avant-garde French painters, such as Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, but of older, more traditional Barbizon School artists and Jean-François Millet.After returning from France, Homer continued to work as a painter in New York and resumed his practice of painting in series, concentrating on depictions of women and children in outdoor settings. Despite his past triumphs, the new pictures received mixed reviews and sold for only modest prices. In the early 1870s, he began pushing his art and artistic practice in new directions. Most likely in response to a very successful exhibition of American and European watercolors at the National Academy of Design in February 1873, Homer first explored watercolor as a distinct means of artistic expression during a trip to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1873. He exhibited the works completed during this Gloucester visit at the American Society of Painters in Watercolors in the spring of 1874 and became a member of that organization three years later.

All authorship of items in this catalog are described according to the following terms:

Signed [Artist Name] : In cases in which the signature is legible in the lot, this work is described as-is with no attributions given.

By [Artist Name] : The work is by the artist.

Attributed to [Artist Name] : The work may be ascribed to the artist on the basis of style, but there may be some question as to actual authorship.

In the manner of [Artist Name] : The work was executed by an unknown hand, but was designed deliberately to emulate the style of the artist.

After [Artist Name] : The work was executed by an unknown hand, but is a deliberate copy of a known work by the artist.

Circle of [Artist Name] : A work of the period of the artist showing his influence, closely associated with the artist but not necessarily his pupil.

Follower of [Artist Name]: A work by a pupil or a follower of the artist (not necessarily a pupil).

American, 19th century: This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).

Mint, based on the description