The New England artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910), will have his first major UK show at London’s National Gallery. Homer is one of the most celebrated and admired American painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The show will take place later this year (10 September 2022 – 8 January 2023).
Little known in Britain, Winslow Homer’s paintings explore the power, grandeur and beauty
This exhibition, which will display over 50 paintings and watercolours from public and private collections, spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, is co-organised with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and presents an opportunity for visitors this side of the Atlantic to discover an artist who, although a household name in America, is not as well known in Europe. There is no painting by Homer in a UK public collection.
The exhibition will be both chronological and thematic and focus on the imagery of conflict and its resolution in Homer’s art. It will address the complex social and geopolitical issues of his era – war, race, class, power – as well as broader concerns with the fragility of human life and dominance of nature, themes that resonate with people today.
As well as being a formidable introduction to the art of Homer, the exhibition will build on the National Gallery’s continuing successful strategy over the last 10 years of introducing British audiences to American art, and follows exhibitions on George Bellows and the Ashcan painters, Frederic Church and Thomas Cole.
Christopher Riopelle, the National Gallery’s Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings, says ‘The opportunity to introduce the gamut of Homer’s achievement to a British audience with many of his most ambitious paintings, and to underline the importance in that career of the two years he spent here at Cullercoats, carries the National Gallery’s commitment to the display and study of American art to a new level.’
National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, says ‘Little known in Britain, Winslow Homer’s paintings explore the power, grandeur and beauty of nature as well as the dangers it poses to human life. Conflict in human relations, the struggle for survival, and personal isolation are among his themes, treated both poetically and with dazzling technical bravura. The National Gallery is delighted to be sharing this exhibition with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.’
Exhibition organised by The National Gallery, London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The exhibition is curated by Christopher Riopelle, The Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Painting at the National Gallery in collaboration with Stephanie Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture, and Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of The American Wing at The Met.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition of Winslow Homer’s works (Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents) will be on view from 11 April 2022 to 31 July 2022.