William R. Cross William R. Cross William R. Cross
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William R. Cross is available for book readings and speaking engagements. Contact him to learn more.

    Today, Picador released the paperback edition of “ Today, Picador released the paperback edition of “Winslow Homer: American Passage.” 

It is as beautiful as the hardcover, and the same size. What an honor to read in one review that “Cross reveals how Homer’s radiant and dramatic paintings are also shaped by profound questions about humankind’s place in the glory of nature….With plentiful color reproductions, Cross’s meticulous, vivid, and revelatory biography transforms our appreciation for this quietly steadfast and subtly trailblazing artist.” 

Homer at the Beach . . . and Homer for the beach, and into the beach-bag of every reader.

#americanart
#americanpainting
#americanhistory
#marinepainting
#winslowhomer
#picador
#newpaperbacks
#watercolor
#summerreading
    RIP “The Cliffs,” 1879-2024. A Grand Dame of the G RIP “The Cliffs,” 1879-2024. A Grand Dame of the Gilded Age breathed her last on April 19th, at 145 years. 

She was born to a gifted mother and a brilliant godfather. Alice Lloyd Greenwood (1835-1924) was among Boston’s most insightful citizens. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s founder described her as one of two advisers outside his family that he trusted most. Novelist Sarah Orne Jewett dedicated to her the short stories published as “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” George Dudley Howe (1829-1903), who married Alice in 1858, seems not to have done much with his life but enjoy it as heir to a vast fortune left him by his merchant father in 1871.

Alice and George hired Arthur Little (1852-1925) to design “The Cliffs.” The aspiring architect had never before built anything, and completed this house at just 27 years old. A decade later he would establish a highly successful partnership with Herbert W. C. Browne that lasted the rest of Little’s life. Little found his inspiration in New England vernacular architecture which, he wrote “is everywhere marked with peculiar dignity, simplicity and refinement.” 

Architectural critic George Sheldon wrote in 1886 that “the charming cottage seems to have sprung from its location, and to be indigenous to the rocky soil itself.” He also admired its economy: $15,000 for a five-bedroom house (plus rooms for five servants) that centered around an entry hall 15 feet wide by 45 feet deep with a large brick fireplace. “Exterior and interior alike administer to one harmonious result,” Sheldon wrote. “As in the days of Pompeii, [when] the houses, though not extravagant, were examples of unity of design.” A preliminary sketch survives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Three years later, Little completed a house for his parents in Swampscott for a similar seaside site. With a spirit of play characteristic of the Shingle Style, his porch pillars are tree trunks, a bulb accentuates the front door, and a three-story octagonal tower anchors the house’s southwest corner. 

May we weep, honor and learn.

2018.839.99
2018.839.96

#shinglestyle
#arthurlittle
#manchesterbythesea
#gildedage
#newenglandvernacular
#metmuseum
    The architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White is The architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White is renowned today for its late work in a Beaux Arts or Roman imperial idiom, such as the Boston Public Library and its neighbor Symphony Hall, the campus of Columbia University, New York’s now-vanished Penn Station and the over-the-top Metropolitan and University clubhouses. 

Charles F. McKim and his business partners William R. Mead founded the firm in 1877. Two years later they recruited a younger friend, and brilliant but self-taught designer, Stanford White, to replace William Bigelow, the third founder. White was a perfect complement to McKim’s compositional excellence and Mead’s business savvy.

Among the firm’s greatest achievements is a Baltimore townhouse built in 1882, that demonstrates White’s extravagant skill in creating luxurious surfaces – often by using inexpensive components in innovative ways. The brick and sandstone house, located in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, contains 46 rooms spread over 17,000 square feet. Many of the spaces have enchanting quirks, such as inventive geometric incising on wood panels, cavorting carved fish, imaginative glass, and hammered brass – even on the door that conceals the safe! 

The firm designed it for 32 year old Ross R. Winans and his first cousin Catherine, whom he married when she was 17. She was 22 when the couple built the house; each was an heir to one of the country’s largest fortunes, made by their grandfather’s inventions of more powerful locomotive engines that would prove stabler on rough tracks. Both spouses’ fathers contributed to the fortune through their own ingenuity in selling and financing the engines, most notably to the Russian Tsar. Ross was born in St. Petersburg. 

Catherine and two of thecouple's three surviving children died in 1907. Ross died five years later. The house became a school, then a funeral home and most recently a corporate headquarters. The house’s owner has been an exemplary steward and was duly proud of its excellence – shining in the 21st century as it did when it when completed 144 years ago. 

#americanarchitecture 
#baltimore 
#gildedage 
#tiffany
    You read it first here . . . Singing Beach, Manche You read it first here . . . Singing Beach, Manchester MA at dusk today.

#beach
#love
#purpose
    Happy Birthday to Louis Comfort Tiffany, born this Happy Birthday to Louis Comfort Tiffany, born this day in New York City 176 years ago, in 1848. 

When asked his profession Louis always answered “artist” but his true calling was as a particular kind of impresario.  His father Charles, founder of the jewelry business, had an instinctive understanding of markets to address.  So did Louis.  Also like his father, Louis knew how to assemble a team to create and sell objects of distinctive beauty that found compelling appeal in those markets.  Louis’s firms made products of many types — from stained glass windows and mosaic installations to electric lamps, blown glass vases and furniture.  The designers of these products are often identifiable, such as Frederick Wilson (a figure specialist), Agnes Northrop (landscape windows), Clara Driscoll (lamps) or Jacob Holzer (mosaics). They are occasionally surprising, and include Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Elihu Vedder and even Maxfield Parrish. 

Through his life and work, Louis Tiffany sought to pursue not only beauty — as he claimed — but enchantment.  And in his dexterity of execution through an able team of colleagues he democratized design in ways that resonated both in his time and in ours.

I will tell the story of Louis’s gilded life in a biography that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will release in the spring of 2026. 

#louiscomforttiffany 
#glass 
#enchantment 
#americanart 
#americanartist 
#collaboration 
#design
    On an unexpectedly warm and windless Christmas Eve On an unexpectedly warm and windless Christmas Eve, a family of kayakers navigated around the rocks in front of our house.

May you too encounter the unexpected this night, and tomorrow. Rediscover wonder and joy in the greatest gift of all -- no matter what the weather. Merry Christmas.

#kayak 
#kayaklife 
#kayaking 
#joy 
#christmas 
#winslowhomer
#capeann 
#capeannma
#manchesterbythesea
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    Section 1

    “When I have selected the thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears.”

    Winslow Homer

    Section 2

    “[Homer] has no imagination, but he contrives to elevate this rather blighting negative into a blooming and honorable positive. He is almost barbarously simple . . .”

    Henry James

    Section

    “Winslow Homer is the Walt Whitman among our painters . . . He is astoundingly, startlingly truthful.”

    Ernest Knaufft

    Section

    “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

    Walt Whitman

    Copyright © 2026, William R. Cross. All Rights Reserved.

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