Winslow Homer in the Adirondacks

by David Tatham

In this lavishly illustrated volume, David Tatham turns his eye to Winslow Homer's Adirondack oils, drawings, prints, and watercolors - more than a hundred pieces from the artist's many visits to the region between 1870 and 1910. Homer's affinity for this remote region of New York State lasted for forty years. No other place - not even Prout's Neck in Maine - held his attention as an artist for so long a period. Nearly every time he set out for the Adirondacks he went to the same two places - the environs of Keene Valley and a group of rustic buildings in a forest clearing in the Essex County township of Minerva, south of the High Peaks. Tatham casts Homer's early Adirondack works as postbellum pastorals and explores the impact of Darwinian thought on Homer's later works. He examines the concepts of landscape and wilderness, the development of the Adirondack park, and the forest preservation movement, as well as Homer's contemporaneous work in Maine, the Caribbean, and England.