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Winslow Homer’S Seascapes: Transcendental Subjects, Popular Resorts, Critical Reactions, Priscilla Paton

Maine History

Winslow Homer, acknowledged as a quintessential Yankee and one of America 's foremost nineteenth century artists, seems as formidable, stern, and ambiguous as the rocky shores that fascinated him. Homer's reception by critics highlights the impossibility of separating artistic achievement from the tastes and fashions of the society in which the artist worked. The “mystifyingly blank" faces that critics abhorred in Homer's early farm figures became the distinctively attractive features of his later seascapes.