Winslow Homer

Charles D. Prentice, Jr., Greenfield, Massachusetts

Vose Galleries, Boston

Steven Straw Company, Newburyport, Massachusetts

Wolf Family Collection No. 0230 (acquired from the above in 1978)

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery, 1980 (on loan)

New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Winslow Homer in Monochrome, 1986-87, no. 46

In this exquisite drawing shaded with extensive graphite hatching and built up in bright moments of white gouache, Winslow Homer conducts an intimate character study. Perched on the edge of her stool, a young girl is absorbed in a book and pays the artist no mind. This subject speaks to a shift in Homer’s artistic practice from depicting social and active women outdoors in the 1860s to focusing on solitary, even aloof women over the next decade. One scholar has suggested that these later images of women reading indicate a focus on leisure rather than work through the lens of the Victorian idealization of feminine virtue.

The subject of the present work has not been conclusively identified, although scholars have observed that Homer rarely individualized his images of children to this extent, suggesting he knew the girl. One scholar speculates that the girl is Mary, the young daughter of his friend and patron Lawson Valentine, who would have been 13 in 1875.