Happy Birthday to One of America's Best-Known Artists, Winslow Homer (1836–1910)

"I prefer every time a picture composed and painted out-doors. The thing is done without your knowing it. Very much of the work now being done in studios should be done in the open air. This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle, and to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself."

—Winslow Homer, 1882

Source: National Museum of American Art. (Washington, D.C. and Boston, New York, Toronto and London: National Museum of American Art with Bulfinch Press, Little Brown and Company, 1995).

Pictured: Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Bear Hunting, Prospect Rock,1892, watercolor, sheet: 13 15/16 x 20 1/16 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.