Beginning with the Civil War and throughout his career, Winslow Homer (18361910) insightfully recorded the sweeping panorama of American life. Homer's dynamic compositions and strong sense of design, color, and light imbued his subjects with a psychological truthfulness that was unprecedented in American art and introduced a new realism into what had been an overly sentimental tradition of genre painting. While quintessentially American, his work also paralleled such developments in European art as impressionism and embodied universal themes that transcended national concerns.
