Currently not on view
Eastern Point Light,
1880
More Context
Handbook Entry
A major turning point in Winslow Homer’s career occurred when he took up the demanding medium of watercolor for the first time during the summer of 1873 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he painted vignettes of young boys and girls at play along the harbor shore. In their relatively tight execution and careful delineation of detail, these works have been called "colored drawings." Executed seven summers later on Ten Point Island, in the middle of Gloucester’s outer harbor, <em>Eastern Point Light</em> belongs to a radically different group of watercolors that shows Homer boldly pushing himself to achieve an unprecedented expressiveness, occasionally verging on abstraction. He began to paint wet on wet, sometimes first soaking his paper in water so that the pigment washes flowed freely, sometimes mixing wet and dry brushwork for certain areas or forms. The near monochromatic palette of blues and blacks, set off by whites, distinguishes this work from the many incandescent sunset scenes in the series. Here, the full moon and its reflection replace the hot colors of the sunsets; now only the red pinpoint of the lighthouse beacon recalls Homer’s treatment of the earlier evening hours. For the whites, Homer employed a number of techniques, including scraping out the circle of the moon and dragging a relatively dry brush across the sheet to allow its plain surface to show through, with the pigment caught on top of the paper’s rough weave. For the vast night sky, Homer rapidly spread his blue washes across the sheet, slightly changing their opacity to suggest high clouds as well as silvery luminosity. The overall result of these experimental techniques is a magical work of deceptive simplicity and almost contradictory powers, in which we are aware of flat surface and expansive space, enclosing darkness and illuminated heavens, immediate place and universal cosmos. This watercolor suggests, among other sensations, the themes of isolation and aloneness that the artist continued to explore for the rest of his career.
Information
1880
United States, Massachusetts, Eastern Point Light
Schooners in Moonlight
- American water color society: fourteenth annual exhibition, (New York: National Academy of Design, 1881)., no. 540
- William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer, (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin company, 1911)., p. 94
- Century loan exhibition as a memorial to Winslow Homer, (Prouts Neck, ME: Prouts Neck Association, 1936)., Reproduced as no. 7 ("Schooners at Sunset, 1880", but this number and title belong to another picture, with the preroduction being this one--accession card note)
- Theodore Bolton, "The life portraits of James Madison", William and Mary Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Jan., 1951): p. 25-47.
- The art of Winslow Homer: an exhibition of paintings sponsored jointly by the art departments of Bowdoin and Colby Colleges, (Brunswick, ME?: Bowdoin College: Colby College, 1954).
- Frances Follin Jones, "Recent aquisitions of Ancient Art", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 17, no. 1 (1958): p. 41–43., p. 42 [as Schooners in Moonlight]
- John Walker, James J. Rorimer and Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, Winslow Homer: a retrospective exhibition, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian institution, 1958). , no. 102
- Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, Winslow Homer, American artist: his world and his work, (New York: C. N. Potter, 1961)., p. 94 (illus.)
- Barbara T. Ross, American Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University: 130 Selected Examples (Princeton: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1976)., pp. 40-41, no. 38; p. 41 (illus.)
- Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Work of Winslow Homer, (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1979)., p. 304; cat. no. CL-373 (illus.)
- Ziba de Weck, Winslow Homer and the New England coast: November 9, 1984-January 9, 1985, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fairfield County, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984)., fig. 7; p. 5-6
- John Wilmerding et al., Winslow Homer in the 1870s: Selections from the Valentine-Pulsifer Collection, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1990)., fig. 3;p. 56 (illus.)
- Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Winslow Homer: watercolors, (Southport, CT?: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1991)., p. 45 (illus.)
- Winslow Homer, water and light: selected watercolors, 1874-1897, (Miami, FL: Center for the Fine Arts Association, 1991)., p. 10-11 (illus.)
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Charles Colbert, "Winslow Homer: reluctant modern," Winterthur portfolio 38, no. 1 (Spring 2003): p. 37-55.
, fig. 12; p. 51 (illus.) - John Wilmerding et al., American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum: volume 1: drawings and watercolors, (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 160, cat. no. 36; p. 161 (illus.); p. 319, checklist no. 477
- Valerie Ann Leeds and Hollis Koons McCullough, By the light of the moon: the paintings of Ray Ellis, (Savannah, Ga.: Compass Publishing, 2007)., p. 16 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 263 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 315
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American Drawings In The Art Museum, Princeton University (October 3, 1976 - November 28, 1976)
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Winslow Homer and the New England Coast (November 9, 1984 - January 9, 1985)
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Winslow Homer Watercolors (National Gallery of Art, March 2- May 11, 1986; Amon Carter Museum, June 6-July 27, 1986; Yale University Art Gallery, September 11-November 2, 1986)
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West to Wesselmann: American Drawings and Watercolors from the Princeton University Art Museum (October 16, 2004–July 23, 2006)
