HYBRID IN-PERSON AND ONLINE PROGRAM - please note time

Winslow Homer and the American Sublime

Aneta Georgievska-Shine, professor of art history, University of Maryland

(Reception 10:30 - 11 am)

Exploring 19th century American Art & Artists is a 6-lecture series. The late nineteenth century was an era of tremendous artistic experimentation. While discussions of the various developments of this period typically focus on European centers such as Paris or London, American painters were no less important in terms of the ways in which they departed from the academic tradition, with its long-established ideals about “beauty” or the “hierarchy of genres.” In this series, we look at some of the key figures from this period and the ways in which they transformed the American visual culture through new ways of seeing and painting.

The first lecture in the series focuses on Winslow Homer. Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is widely regarded as the greatest American painter of the nineteenth century. Unlike many of his peers, he showed particular interest in ordinary subjects: rural schoolchildren, hunting scenes, or the lives of recently emancipated African Americans. His uncompromising realism charted a new course for American art, which had been dominated by history paintings and portraits of the upper-class. No less significant was his contribution to landscape painting: rather than idealized vistas, he captured the sublime power of wild, untamed nature in spontaneous, gestural brushwork.

$15 fee for guests and subscribers (no fee for members)