How Winslow Homer Challenged the Rules of Watercolor

Speaker: Elizabeth Athens, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut, and Former Assistant Curator of American Art at the Worcester Art Museum

Watercolor conjures notions of the delicate, the ethereal, the precise—of washes of color and of scenes bathed in light. Yet Winslow Homer actively took on those assumptions: digging into his paper, scratching out areas, and making brilliant use of accidents. Expert Elizabeth Athens will examine the scope of the nineteenth-century watercolor tradition in the United States, with a special focus on how Homer’s work both drew on and defied it.