Winslow Homer: Force of Nature

Issued January 2022

10 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
Ground Floor Galleries
Admission charge

The first in-depth exhibition in the UK to show the art of Winslow Homer (1836–1910), one of the most celebrated and admired American painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, will take place at the National Gallery later this year (10 September 2022 – 8 January 2023).

This exhibition, which will display over 50 paintings and watercolours from public and private collections, spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career,, is co-organised with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and presents an opportunity for visitors this side of the Atlantic to discover an artist who, although a household name in America, is not as well known in Europe. There is no painting by Homer in a UK public collection.

As well as being a formidable introduction to the art of Homer, the exhibition will build on the National Gallery’s continuing successful strategy over the last 10 years of introducing British audiences to American art, and follows exhibitions on George Bellows and the Ashcan painters, Frederic Church and Thomas Cole.

Christopher Riopelle, the National Gallery’s Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings, says, ‘The opportunity to introduce the gamut of Homer’s achievement to a British audience with many of his most ambitious paintings, and to underline the importance in that career of the two years he spent here at Cullercoats, carries the National Gallery’s commitment to the display and study of American art to a new level.'

National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, says, 'Little known in Britain, Winslow Homer’s paintings explore the power, grandeur and beauty of nature as well as the dangers it poses to human life. Conflict in human relations, the struggle for survival, and personal isolation are among his themes, treated both poetically and with dazzling technical bravura. The National Gallery is delighted to be sharing this exhibition with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.’ 

Exhibition organised by the National Gallery, London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition is curated by Christopher Riopelle, The Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Painting at the National Gallery in collaboration with Stephanie Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture, and Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of The American Wing, at The Met.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition of Winslow Homer’s works will be on view from 11 April 2022 – 31 July 2022.

More information at nationalgallery.org.uk

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Exhibition sponsored by

Supported by

Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation

Notes to editors

Winslow Homer
'The Gulf Stream', 1899 (reworked by 1906)
Oil on canvas
71.4 x 124.8 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906 (06.1234)
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

For further information, please contact the National Gallery Press Office on press@ng-london.org.uk

Publicity images can be obtained from https://press.nationalgallery.org.uk/