BOSTON.- Winslow Homer: American Scenes, an installation that spans the breadth of Winslow Homer’s career—from an early drawing he mat age 13, to his last seascape at age 73—debuts today athe Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), in conjunctiwith the opening of the Museum’s new State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance. Winslow Homer: American Scenes celebrates the artistry of the great American master, Winslow Homer (1836–1910), in an installation that highlights approximately 70 of his iconic images, including 11 paintings, five watercolors, and more than 40 prints and drawings selected from the Museum’s extensive collection. Included are familiar masterpieces, such as Boys in a Pasture (1874), Long Branch, New Jersey (1869), and The Fog Warning, Halibut Fishing (1885), as well as the first showing at the MFA of his watercolor Woman Standing by a Gate, Bahamas (1885), acquired by the Museum in 2003. The installation in the Lee Gallery, on view through December 7, is the MFA’s largest since it mounted the exhibition Winslow Homer in 1996.

The installation begins with the artist’s early drawing, Rocket Ship (1849–50), which Homer began in 1849 at the age of 13 when his father, Charles Savage Homer, left his Massachusetts home to prospect for gold out west. Rocket Ship is Homer’s interpretation of a Currier & Ives lithograph that features a miner riding a rocket toward California’s gold fields. The MFA installation continues with a survey of Homer’s Civil War illustrations; his Parisian-influenced works; depictions of rural life; seascapes in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Prout’s Neck, Maine; and images of England, Florida, and the Caribbean. It ends with Driftwood (1909), Homer’s last seascape and his final completed work, a majestic homage to the stormy coast of Prout’s Neck, where he spent the last 27 years of his life.

“Winslow Homer: American Scenes offers visitors a rare and intimate glimpse of the artist’s working method in all media throughout his career and draws upon the rich collections of his work held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” said Elliot Bostwick Davis, John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas department at the MFA, who curated the installation with the assistance of Elizabeth Mitchell, assistant curator, Prints and Drawings.

A native of Boston, Homer was born in 1836 and moved with his family as a young boy to Cambridge, then later to Belmont, Massachusetts. When it became apparent that his talents were more artistic than academic, Homer apprenticed with a commercial lithographer, John H. Bufford, in Boston. While there, he designed sheet music covers for popular songs of the day, creating lithographs for Katy Darling (1855) and The Wreath (1856), which showed his burgeoning artistic potential. Two years later, Homer struck out on his own as a freelance illustrator, working for Ballou’s Pictorial and Harper’s Weekly, among other publications. The artist’s association with Harper’s continued when he moved to New York City in 1859 as a freelancer, covering Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration for the illustrated journal in 1861. Later that year, Homer was assigned by Harper’s to chronicle Union troops in Virginia as a “special artist” at the front during the Civil War.

From this unique vantage point, Homer created popular color lithographs of army camp life for the magazine, and began to paint in oils. The two months he spent in 1862 during the Siege of Yorktown marked the beginning of a prolific period of artistry based upon his wartime experiences, such as the lithograph Campaign Sketches: The Letter for Home (1863) and the painting Playing Old Soldier (1863). Homer also created color illustrations for Louis Prang Company which were used to produce a series of Civil War collectors’ cards, Life in Camp, First Series (1864) and Life in Camp, Second Series (1864), in which he included his self-portrait. Also of note is that Homer was one of the first American artists to give serious attention to African-Americans during the war, as can be seen in his wood engraving, A Bivouac Fire on the Potomac (1861), and the chromolithograph, The Bright Side, drawn by Homer in 1889, which is included in the installation. It is based on his acclaimed Civil War-era painting of the same name that appeared at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, attended by Homer.

During his 10-month sojourn in Paris, Homer became familiar with avant-garde works, especially the French landscape paintings of the Barbizon school, and the early Impressionists. Their treatment of light and the artist’s interest in scenes of popular leisure and urban entertainment can be seen in a variety of his images, including Long Branch, New Jersey (1869), a sun-filled vision of a popular seaside resort in New Jersey, and the wood engraving A Parisian Ball—Dancing at the Mabille, Paris (1867). Another view of the seashore, albeit a more naturalistic one, is the painting Rocky Coast and Gulls (1869), a depiction of a Manchester, Massachusetts, beach populated only by sea gulls and horseshoe crabs.

In the 1870s, the artist created drawings, wood engravings, watercolors, and paintings that celebrated rural life in works such as Twilight at Leeds, New York (1876), and a variety of scenes based on travels throughout the Adirondacks, Gloucester, and Prout’s Neck. After the devastation of war, Homer focused for a time on optimistic pictures of young people enjoying themselves outdoors, which harkened back to simpler, more innocent days. These include the wood engraving Snap the Whip! (1873), the paintings The Dinner Horn (about 1870) and Enchanted (1874, Private Collection), and the perennial favorite, Boys in a Pasture (1874).

From rural life to seascapes, Winslow Homer: American Scenes also highlights the period Homer spent in Gloucester. There he lived in solitude on Ten Pound Island in the summer of 1880, producing more than 100 watercolors and drawings including Girl Seated (1880), and he continued to find inspiration in Gloucester during the ensuing years, as seen in Gloucester, Mackerel Fleet at Sunset (1884), part of a group of paintings he did for the interior of his brother’s boat, and The Fog Warning, Halibut Fishing (1885).

For the last 27 years of his life, Homer was based at his family’s compound on Prout’s Neck, where he continued to produce numerous seascapes, including the painting The Lookout—“All’s Well” (1896), and etchings of The Life Line (1884) and Eight Bells (1887), based on his oil paintings of the same name. Homer also a trip to Cullercoats, a fishing village in England, as reflected in the etching, Mending the Nets (1888), and tempered the harsh New England winters with visits to Cuba, the Bahamas, and Florida. The watercolors Street Corner, Santiago de Cuba (1885), and Woman Standing by a Gate, Bahamas (1885), and Palm Trees, Florida (1904) depict his visits to sunnier climes.

Winslow Homer: American Scenes concludes with his dramatic masterpiece, Driftwood (1909), the artist’s last work, a seascape completed the year before he died. The installation also features Homer’s illustrations for the anthology, Winter Poems (1871) and his silhouettes for James Russell Lowell’s 1874 book, The Courtin’. (The latter are evocative of another MFA work, Kara Walker’s The Rich Soil Down There (2002), exhibited on the second floor of the West Wing, a tableau that uses silhouetted figures to provide a visual commentary on unsettling relationships caused by racial and gender stereotypes.)

Joining Winslow Homer: American Scenes are two additional installations that also are on display today in celebration of the State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance: Preserving History, Making History: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, an exploration of the MFA’s history from its founding in 1870 to the present, with a look toward the future (on view through September 22); and Great Company: Portraits by European Masters, a selection of renowned portraiture from the Museum’s collection (on view through January 5, 2009).