1873
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Boy with Anchor is a 1873 by Winslow Homer, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
Here’s a boy on a dock holding a huge ship anchor. The anchor looms over him like a quiet warning. Homer painted this in Gloucester, where fishing was tough for families. He turns our eyes to kids waiting for parents who might not come back. The sky and water feel heavy with what’s coming next. It’s one of his first steps toward looser watercolor style. See this up close at The Cleveland Museum of Art.
In this work from a series of watercolors produced in Gloucester, MA, in the summer of 1873 Winslow Homer evokes the fraught nature of the local fishing industry by focusing not on the perilous work of adults, but rather the children they leave behind. In Boy with Anchor , the massive anchor pointing toward the sea foreshadows the weight of the boy’s maritime destiny. The work is an early example of Homer's talent for evoking atmospheric effects and his interest in technical variety. Presumably working outdoors, Homer layered fluent washes of blue, gray, and brown transparent watercolor over…
The mottled texture of the sky is an example of Homer’s blotting technique—a subtractive process in which he applied a wash of water, sprinkled some breadcrumbs, and then gently rubbed the paper with his fingers in order to absorb the extra color, leaving behind a granulated texture.
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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