?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
WINSLOW HOMER Perils of the Sea.
Etching on imitation Japan paper, 1888. 415x553 mm; 16⅜x21¾ inches, full margins. Edition of approximately 100. Signed and inscribed "N.A." in pencil, lower right. Published by Klackner, New York, with the address and date lower center. A very good, richly-inked impression of this scarce etching.
In the discussion of this print in Goodrich's Record of Works by Winslow Homer, edited and expanded upon by Abigail Booth Gerdts, published by The Goodrich-Homer Art Education Project, in 2012, impressions published by Christian Klackner, Homer's New York print dealer, formerly of Knoedler Company, were printed on "heavy-weight, smooth surfaced rag-based paper variously called vellum or parchment" and light weight imitation Japan paper. The current lot, pencil-signed by the artist with the honorific "N.A." (to denote Homer's 1865 election as a full academician of the National Academy of Design) most closely resembles the example (number 98) lent by Kovler Gallery, Chicago for Goodrich's 1968 landmark exhibition "The Graphic Work of Winslow Homer" organized by the Museum of Graphic Art, New York.
In 1881, Homer (1836-1910) traveled to England on his second and final trip abroad. After passing briefly through London, he settled in Cullercoats, a village near Tynemouth on the North Sea, remaining there from the spring of 1881 to November 1882. He often located his paintings of Cullercoats at the harbor and along the water's edge, where the community awaited the return of fishermen from their labor on the harsh North Sea. In these works, Homer celebrated the rugged fortitude of the fishermen's wives, whom he depicted with a new monumentality, possibly inspired by the Greek sculpture and other European art he had seen in London (Jean-François Millet had gradually popularized such representations in his Barbizon school paintings, drawings and prints a generation earlier).
In Perils of the Sea, he focused on two women to convey the distress caused by the unpredictable whims of nature. From the shore, they scan the horizon for their absent loved ones and anticipate their uncertain return with an anxiety echoed by the dim skies and turbulent waves. There is a same-titled watercolor of this subject from 1881 now in the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown. Goodrich 98.
