1873
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
A Clam-Bake is a 1873 by Winslow Homer, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see boys in rolled-up pants digging for clams at low tide, a steaming pot on driftwood, gulls circling, and a sky full of thin clouds. Homer sketched this on a Massachusetts beach in 1873, right after he switched from black-and-white illustrations to watercolor. The paint is so light it almost looks like a colored drawing—you can still see pencil lines under the washes. If you like this quiet, sunlit scene, look up more paintings of america from the same time.
During the first part of his career, Winslow Homer supported himself as an illustrator, but in the early 1870s he found that he could make a good living through the sale of his watercolors. His early watercolors, such as this one of boys on a beach at Gloucester, Massachusetts, show a tentative use of the technique and often have the effect of colored line drawings. Homer later combined the composition of this watercolor with other sketches to produce the illustration A Clam-Bake, which appeared in Harper's Weekly on August 23, 1873.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects.
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