Lectures at the MFA - Winslow Homer at the Shore

Winslow Homer is best known today as a romantic marine painter, a heroic and solitary figure who spent the last decades of his career chronicling the ocean’s eternal rhythms in a series of rugged coastal locales far removed the distractions of contemporary society. The image of Homer as a reclusive genius is appealing and deep rooted (with origins in early 20th-century biographies and survey exhibitions), but it obscures the social character of the artist’s life and work on the coasts, his intense and long running fascination with the people who lived, labored, and vacationed on the ocean’s edge. Immersing himself in the social life of the shore, Homer found the creative material for innovative paintings of workers and beachgoers that challenged pictorial convention, explored the hardships of coastal labor, and celebrated the beach as a place of bodily spectacle and relaxed gender norms. Learn more about Homer’s interest in coastal work and gain a sense of his role as one of the first American artists to document beach leisure as it emerged as a cultural phenomenon in the years after the Civil War; with a focus on Prouts Neck, Maine; Gloucester, Massachusetts; and Long Branch, New Jersey. Sari Edelstein, professor of English and associate chair, University of Massachusetts, Boston Ross Barrett, director of Graduate Studies and associate professor of American Art, Boston University Wednesday, December 10, 2025