Winslow Homer was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1836. His mother Henrietta, an amateur watercolorist, was his first teacher, while his father Charles left the family hardware store for the California gold rush and later schemes in Europe. At 19 Homer was apprenticed to a Boston commercial lithographer, drawing sheet music covers in reverse on limestone, and when he quit to freelance for Harper’s Weekly he vowed never to have a master again. In 1861 he joined George B. McClellan’s army on the Potomac.

His war pictures, including Sharpshooter on Picket Duty and Prisoners from the Front, showed waiting and exhaustion rather than battle, and A Visit from the Old Mistress set freed people and their former enslaver on equal footing. In Paris in 1867 he ignored the Impressionists, and from 1873 watercolor gave him steadier sales. After two years in Cullercoats, England, he settled in 1883 at Prouts Neck, Maine, 75 feet from the Atlantic, painting Undertow, Eight Bells, The Gulf Stream, and The Fox Hunt.

• Henry James called Homer’s subjects unpictorial but conceded the paintings were incontestably successful.
• One critic wrote that a child with an ink bottle could not have done worse than his watercolors.
• Undertow earned Homer only $400, and he relied on his brother Charles for financial support.
• His Bahamas watercolor Children Under a Palm Tree was rediscovered on Antiques Roadshow in 2008.
• He died at Prouts Neck in 1910 with Shooting the Rapids unfinished on his easel.