Speaking & Events

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

Contact the Author

(New Events Posted Regularly!)

November 5 / Sharon Country Club, Sharon, CT (Private)

November 17 / Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (Public)

January 10 / Colony Club, New York (Private)

January 12 / Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA (Public)

January 25 / University Club, New York (Private)

February 1 / The Boston Athenaeum (Public)

February 15 / St. Botolph Club, Boston (Private)

February 22 / Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (Public)

March 1 / Cleveland Museum of Art (Public)

March 15 / Union Club, Boston (Private)

April 18 / Detroit Institute of Arts (Public)

May 4 / Women’s Athletic Club, Chicago (Private)

Connect

This is the etching Whistler made in 1859 that bea

This is the etching Whistler made in 1859 that bears an interesting comparison to Homer’s meditative oil of about 1872, which is often considered a portrait of Helena de Kay. Prints were an easy way for pictorial ideas to travel in the 19th century. My strong suspicion is that Homer had seen this print long before he painted his remarkable, and very beautiful, picture.

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903): “Reading by Lamplight,” 1859, Etching and drypoint; third state of three (Glasgow); black ink on fine off-white antique laid paper, 9 7/8 × 7 1/4 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Julia H. Manges, in memory of her husband, Dr. Morris Manges, 1960

#americanart
#metmuseum
#winslowhomer
#americanartist

This is one of the most beautiful and unusual wedd

This is one of the most beautiful and unusual wedding presents on which I have ever laid my eyes. On June 3rd, 1874, Winslow Homer gave the picture to Helena de Kay and her new husband, Richard Watson Gilder. Each was well-connected and hospitable, especially to artists, writers and other creative people. And they were well-suited to one another. Homer knew both bride and groom before their wedding, and sustained his friendship with the Gilders over their long marriage, sharing their table with the likes of Walt Whitman and William and Henry James. Although some would wish otherwise, there is no evidence whatsoever of romantic attachment between Winslow and Helena. It is presumed that Helena was his sitter for the picture, although that does not make it a portrait.

The tiny canvas (31 x 47 centimeters) is closer in spirit and dimensions to a print than to an oil painting. The picture’s closed book, scattered petals and its sitter’s bent head all beg further inquiry – and resist it. In its muted palette, meditative mood and compressed composition, this oil bears comparison to Whistler’s 1859 etching “Reading by Lamplight.” As that is a vertical-format print, I will post it separately in a moment.

Correspondence from Homer suggests that when he made this painting in 1872 he had known Helena as an aspiring painter and an enthusiast for the arts, and had encouraged her in an avuncular way. The peculiarly dour mood of the painting may say more about its reserved painter than about the extroverted woman to whom, with her husband, he gave it.

In any event, the picture is one of many reasons to visit Madrid, where it hangs on the walls of the superb Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, across the street from the Prado. Velasquez would have admired Homer’s contemplative meditation – and now his compatriots, and many other visitors, can enjoy it too.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910): “Portrait of Helena de Kay,” c. 1872, Oil on canvas, 31 × 47 cm., Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, 1983.25.

#americanart
#museothyssen
#winslowhomer
#americanartist
#madrid
#velasquez

How do you celebrate a 100th birthday? Winslow Hom

How do you celebrate a 100th birthday? Winslow Homer answered with dignity, truth, and hope.

His best-known response is an oil depicting two generations: a grandfatherly figure and a group of boys, out for a sail in what he called “A Fair Wind.” The missing generation reflects so many men lost in the Civil War, whose legacy was present in their absence. Despite and through sorrow and ambiguity, he invokes hope.

In a pair of pictures set in the same room, he depicts the truth of tension amid vast disparities in wealth, education and experience – lived side-by-side. He calls us out of many to become one: E Pluribus Unum.

Least known of his Centennial pictures is a watercolor: a boy plows a field as spring flowers bloom. In its large size, its wide-ranging technique and its quiet monumentality, Homer invokes the dignity of his model. This determined Black boy is an Everyman – a model for all Americans.

May Homer’s head, heart and hand guide us from afar into a deeper understanding of what it means to be American, that we may find common ground as one people.

On April 18th, I will speak at this watercolor’s home, the Detroit Institute of Arts, about Winslow Homer’s life and work.

https://dia.org/events/aaw-lecture-and-cocktail-reception-william-cross

All by Winslow Homer (1836-1910):

“A Fair Wind” (“Breezing Up”), 1873-1876, Oil on canvas, 24 3/16 × 38 3/16 in., National Gallery of Art, 1943.13.1.

"Sunday Morning in Virginia," 1877, oil on canvas, 18 3/8 x 24 in. Cincinnati Art Museum, 1924.247.

"Visit from the Old Mistress," 1876. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., 1909.7.28.

[For more on this pair, see this post on the Dutch website ArtWay.eu:

https://www.artway.eu/artway.php?id=1257&lang=en&action=show&type=imagemeditations ]

Blossom Time in Virginia, 1876. Watercolor, 14 x 20 in., Detroit Institute of Arts, 70.259.

#americanart
#diadetroit
#ngadc
#cincyartmuseum
#smithsonianamericanartmuseum
#saam
#winslowhomer

Winslow Homer called this “the most important pi

Winslow Homer called this “the most important picture I ever painted, and the very best one.” Why?

Three young women stand on the edge of a seaside cliff, bathed in the rising sun and enraptured by something that we, the viewers, cannot see. Their heavy nets and baskets awaiting their catch tell us they are fisherfolk, awaiting the moment at which they get to work. Their postures and expressions reflect both a practical hope and an inner light. Strong, sturdy, steadfast, these women are archetypes for our contemplation.

Homer’s original title evoked the sight and sound of a bird. It was “Hark, Hark, the Lark!,” a familiar quotation from one of Shakespeare’s final plays, “Cymbeline” (1610). The play’s cast includes a loutish villain named Cloten, who requests from a troupe of musicians an intoxicating tune that might persuade his stepsister to accept his unwelcome sexual advances. The song the villain commands begins “Hark, hark! The lark at heaven’s gate sings.”

Homer turned Shakespeare’s tale on its head. Symbolist painters like Burne-Jones cast young women in poses that evoked a sense of their capture in a dream – with few prospects for exit. Homer endows his characters with agency. Through the language of Symbolism, he offers a narrative of tender hope.

His models evoke an authentic faith, a visual expression of another familiar quotation: “We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” Neither Homer nor his models deny danger and the possibility of despair. But they dare to look longer, wider, and deeper – and call us to do likewise.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910): “Hark! The Lark,” 1882. Oil on canvas, 36⅜ × 31⅜ in., Milwaukee Art Museum, Leighton Art Collection, gift of Frederick Leighton, L99.

Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898): “The Garden of the Hesperides,” 1869-1873, Watercolor on paper laid on canvas, 119 x 98 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett, 74419.

#americanart
#hamburger.kunsthalle
#milwaukeeart
#cullercoats
#tynemouth
#winslowhomer
#preraphaelitesociety
#symbolism

Winslow Homer wrote in 1896 that when Pittsburgh's

Winslow Homer wrote in 1896 that when Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute hosted its first ever show, he would send “but one picture to your exhibition, but that is the best one I have painted this year.” When its First Annual Exhibition opened on November 5, the institute awarded Homer a medal and a $5,000 prize for the single best American painting in the show, and the museum’s first acquisition. It was an enormous honor and a high price.

The picture is complex and powerful, with a spectral, dystopian vista and just one clearly defined figure: a tall, somber man with his right arm raised. Homer allows little relief from his bleak, disciplined palette: the six-sided yellow star on the lifeboat’s stern, a yellow sou’wester and the red scarves of two women on the bluff. It’s a picture whose outcome is uncertain, of salvation hoped for but not yet achieved.

Homer couldn’t quite control his itch to keep improving it. When he took the train to Pittsburgh in the fall of 1897 to participate in the jury choosing the winners among the submissions to the Second Annual, he had a second objective: “to have time to look about in my own way & particularly to overlook & put in order (as it must need it by this time) the picture of The Wreck.” Homer’s luggage contained what he described as “the proper varnish & a brush & sponge.” He would make no trouble for the staff, he wrote, as he was coming a day early to do his work. “That is all I need but clean water,” he wrote.

As the picture hung in the gallery, Homer quietly scraped out of the center background a three-masted schooner on which hung a signal of distress: an inverted American flag. He covered the traces of the ship with white clouds – or white foam tossed by the waves. What he seems most to have sought was to increase the ambiguity and universality of his canvas. He had done enough already to draw viewers into the picture. Now within its mysteries they might make their own meanings.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910): “The Wreck,” 1896, Oil on canvas, 30⅜ × 48 5/16 in., Carnegie Museum of Art, Museum Purchase (Gallery Fund), 96.1.

#americanart
#carnegiemuseumofart
#shipwreck
#mainecoast
#winslowhomer

Sometimes one detail says it all. “The Brierwood

Sometimes one detail says it all. “The Brierwood Pipe,” among Winslow Homer’s earliest paintings, centers on a Civil War soldier who whittles a tough briar branch to make a pipe, as his companion smokes a pipe of his own. Each wears a Zouave uniform inspired by Algerian tribesmen.

The meditative picture relates to an 1861 poem that linked the distinctive Zouave regiments to a mysterious, romantic power awaiting a summon through such pipes. The poem reads in part: ”I am the soul of the brier; we grew at the root of a tree / where lovers would come in the twilight, two ever, for company.”

Homer’s depiction of the pair of Zouaves evokes both the possibility of an encounter with “the soul of the brier” and the long, lonely days and nights soldiers spent far away from their loved ones at home. The picture also reflects a grim reality: these colorfully clad men were easy targets. Some 1,100 men enlisted in the spring of 1861 in the 5th New York (these men’s company); two years later, 250 remained. The few who returned were the toast of New York, “the focus of ten thousand questions, the cynosure of all eyes, the envy of the men, the delight of the women.”

By the time that Homer exhibited the painting, in the spring of 1864, the work had a nostalgic quality to it, recalling the innocence of the war’s first stage, before the regiment’s colors were “worn, torn, pierced with many bullet holes.” He appealed to viewers’ longing for such innocence and its expression in the gallant sacrifice so many men had made. One critic observed that the picture reflected the strength of Homer’s artistic process. “Mr. Homer studies his figures from realities, in the sunshine. If you wish to see him work you must go out upon the roof, and find him painting what he sees. Not dusky, characterless, dreamy, impossible muchachos, but real things, instinct with life and warm with the glory of God’s sunshine.”

Winslow Homer (1836-1910): “The Brierwood Pipe,” 1864, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, 16 7/8 x 14 ¾ in., Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund,1944.524.

#americanart
#clevelandmuseumofart
#civilwar
#lifeincamp
#winslowhomer

Sounding in all directions: Happy Birthday to Wins

Sounding in all directions: Happy Birthday to Winslow Homer! He was born yesterday plus 187 years: February 24th, 1836.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910), “The Dinner Horn (Blowing the Horn at Seaside),” 1870, oil on canvas, 19 1/4 x 13 3/4 in., National Gallery of Art, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1994.59.2.

#winslowhomer
#ngadc
#birthday
#happybirthday
#americanartist

Spring comes to SAAM and DC! But the Chinese Hack

Spring comes to SAAM and DC! But the Chinese Hackberry tree didn’t get the memo from the daffodils.

#springindc
#hope
#saam
#winslowhomer

Follow on Instagram

Connect on Facebook

News & Events Sign Up