05/12/2026
🌊 Drop, Ripple, Wave - Artwork Highlight! ⭐
In the middle of the 19th century, a new medium came to the scene that changed the way everyday people were able to consume images: the illustrated weekly. We can think of the illustrated weekly as a sort of cross between present-day magazines and illustrated newspapers, and they were revolutionary in their ability to reproduce pictures in large quantities, just as the printing press was able to reproduce text. These images were done as wood engravings, which is when an artist designs an image that is then carved into a piece of wood. The images were transferred onto metal plates so that they could be used many times without wearing out the wood itself. The process was fast, inexpensive, and could reproduce a huge quantity of prints, so it was an immediate hit.
This meant, of course, that the illustrated weeklies needed artists to create images for them. Winslow Homer, although he is better known for the oil paintings of the sea that he painted later in life, spent the first half of his career producing images for these new publications. Over the course of more than 20 years, over 250 of his prints were published in a number of weeklies. The subjects of these prints vary wildly. At the beginning of his career, he published many scenes of young people enjoying pastimes like sleighing, dancing, or playing cricket. During the Civil War, he traveled as a “picture correspondent” to send back illustrations of the war to publications up North. Later, he spent a good deal of his artistic output on images of children, which were particularly popular at the time - Low Tide being an example of this type of picture. Images like At Sea–Signalling a Passing Steamer were some of Homer’s early explorations into the marine scenes that would make his later career (examples include The Fog Warning from 1885 and Northeaster from 1895). Homer largely moved on from these magazine engravings in about 1875, but they had a big influence on the rest of his career.
Caption provided by Avery Dubyk, Samek Art Museum Fellow
📍Winslow Homer, "Low Tide," 1870, Wood engraving on paper
