American Everyman: Winslow Homer

Biographer William R. Cross gives a lively account of artist Winslow Homer’s varied and important life, taken from the text of Cross’ book Winslow Homer: American Passage. Homer was the visual art counterpart to contemporaries in American literature such as Mark Twain, and rubbed elbows with consummate New Yorkers such as his friend General Francis Channing Barlow, whom he depicted in the profound Prisoners from the Front.

Homer was witness not only to the rhythms of sea, storm, tide, and season but also to the times in which he lived. Those times included the US Civil War, colonial tyranny, invention, and industrialization, and the challenge of achieving a just and equitable society in the Gilded Age. Homer’s astonishing breadth of subject, media, and perspective reflects his restless mind and innovative hand. His legacy comprises few answers but a broad range of enduring, entrancing questions.

Join us to see afresh the man behind the art, a major American figure hidden in plain sight.

William R. Cross is the author of Winslow Homer: American Passage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), which The Washington Post calls “an exemplary biography” and The New Yorker named one of the best books of the year. He has spoken widely in Europe and the United States, from the Cleveland Museum of Art to the National Gallery in London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2019, he curated Homer at the Beach, A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869-1880, a nationally acclaimed exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum that revealed Homer’s formation as a marine artist. Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, he is a graduate of Yale College, magna cum laude, and of the Harvard Business School.