Winslow Homer 1836 - 1910

(probably) Wm. A. Butters & Co., Chicago, Illinois, 1879
Charles D. Hamill, Chicago, Illinois, probably 1879
Mrs. Dudley, Chicago, Illinois, 1882 (gifted from the above)
Katherine Dudley, Paris, circa 1935 (bequest from the above)
(Weyhe Gallery, New York, circa 1935)
(Milch Gallery, New York, 1950)
Frank W. Spencer, Morristown, New Jersey, 1950
(Douglas James, Signal Mountain, Tennessee, 1972)
(Anthony Olivo, Providence, Rhode Island, 1974)
(Stephen Straw Company, Inc., Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1974)
Kennedy Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1991

(probably) Chicago, Illinois, Wm. A. Butters and Co., Original Water Color and Charcoal Sketches from Nature by Winslow Homer, N.A., December 1879

Lloyd Goodrich and Abigail Booth Gerdts, Record of Works by Winslow Homer: 1877 to March 1881, New York, 2008, vol. III, no. 860, p. 264, illustrated

Winslow Homer first ventured into the watercolor medium in 1873 with a series of views of Gloucester which predominantly depicted the waterfront activities of this charming coastal town. His approach was not exactly a tentative foray; as a contemporary critic wrote at the time, the artist "made a serious and desperate plunge in to water color painting" which proved so successful that by 1875 he had given up his career as a commercial illustrator entirely.  Going forward, Homer was able to live quite comfortably off the income generated by his watercolors. Working quickly and prolifically, the medium also freed Homer from the  tradition-bound world  of oil painting to experiment  and push the boundaries of the medium's stylistic possibilities.  By the time he executed his last watercolor in 1905, Homer had become, in the words of Marsden Hartley "one of the few great masters of the medium the world has known." (As quoted in Albert Eugene Gallatin, American Water Colorists, New York, 1922, p. 8)

Listening to the Birds is not dated; Abigail Booth Gerdts and Lloyd Goodrich place it in their catalogue raisonné among the works executed  in the late 1870s, around the time of Homer's visits to Houghton Farm in upstate New York, and to the homes of the Preston and Cole families in New Ipswich, New Hampshire and Winchester, Massachusetts.  These rural locations and his friends' families provided Homer with the bucolic, agrarian subject matter to which he returned after exploring it earlier in the decade during what Nicolai Cikovsky identified as a "profound change in his artistic purpose" (Winslow Homer, New York, 1990, p. 58).  Disquieted by the Civil War and its aftermath, the venality of the Gilded Age, and the political corruption of Grant's administration, Homer sought inspiration in scenes which resonated with America's nostalgia for its pre-industrial past.

Listening to the Birds subtly evokes the lost innocence of the antebellum period, represented by two children seated in a grassy meadow.  Far away from the harsh realities of urban existence and not yet burdened by the responsibilities of adulthood, they idle freely in the sunshine listening to the birds.  Broad, modulated washes, loose brushwork and random pools of uneven pigment describe the trees, grass and sky. Remarkably, it is Homer's free and seemingly relaxed technique through which he conveys the sense of idle pleasure at the heart of this watercolor.