The Delicate Works of Winslow Homer Are About to Get Their Rare Moment in the Limelight

The watercolors of the American grasp will likely be on exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Nice Arts, some for the one time in a technology

Amy Crawford

– Contributing Author

November 2025

After getting his begin as a sketch artist on the entrance traces of the Civil Struggle, depicting camp life and battles in common dispatches to Harper’s Weekly, Winslow Homer turned his sense of the dramatic to the pure world, capturing mild and shadow, wind and waves within the vivid watercolors that helped set up him within the American canon. “He was discovering, pushing, experimenting in a medium that was solely starting to be taken critically in America,” says Ethan Lasser, co-curator of an exhibition that includes almost 100 works by Homer that opens this month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “He did one thing with these supplies, these little powder truffles and water, that nobody else has accomplished.” 

One of many first establishments to amass the Boston-born artist’s work, beginning within the Nineties, the Museum of Nice Arts has since amassed the biggest assortment of Homer’s watercolors on the planet. However as a result of these fragile work should be saved fastidiously in the dead of night to stop their pigments from fading, they’ll solely make transient, rare forays to the galleries. Most of the dozens of watercolors on this present had been final on show half a century in the past. “These works haven’t been seen in generations,” Lasser says. “We really feel like each viewers ought to have their probability to see them.”