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For to Be a Farmer's Boy

A work made of transparent and opaque watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, heightened with gum glaze, over graphite, on thick, rough-textured ivory wove paper (lower edge trimmed).
CC0 Public Domain Designation

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  • A work made of transparent and opaque watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, heightened with gum glaze, over graphite, on thick, rough-textured ivory wove paper (lower edge trimmed).

Date:

1887

Artist:

Winslow Homer
American, 1836-1910

About this artwork

For to Be a Farmer’s Boy was painted at Prout’s Neck, Maine, and is one of several watercolors in which Homer returned to his earlier theme of rural American childhood. Although the sky has faded and appears empty, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and FTIR analyses have yielded evidence that the artist originally painted the sky with dilute washes of chrome yellow and pink madder (both fugitive pigments), with a minute amount of vermilion, to create a glowing orange sunset. Thus, the watercolor originally showed a young boy pausing in his work of harvesting pumpkins to gaze off toward the setting sun, recalling the work of French Barbizon School artists, who influenced Homer in his early career. Their pictures of peasants pausing for a moment of contemplation at the end of their workday resonated with Homer, who showed a lifelong preference for depicting workers.

Homer derived the title from an anonymous Old English song: “Though little, I’ll work as hard as a Turk, / If you’ll give me employ /To plow and sow, and reap and mow, / And be a farmer’s boy.” Interestingly, a longer version of the song includes the line “The sun went down behind yon hills,” thereby supporting findings that the watercolor originally depicted an orange sunset.

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Prints and Drawings

Artist

Winslow Homer

Title

For to Be a Farmer's Boy

Place

United States (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1887

Medium

Transparent and opaque watercolor, with rewetting, blotting, and scraping, heightened with gum glaze, over graphite, on thick, rough-textured ivory wove paper (lower edge trimmed)

Inscriptions

Signed recto, lower right, in black watercolor: "Winslow Homer/1887" [over old signature, blotted out: "Winslow Homer/1887"]

Dimensions

35.5 × 50.9 cm (14 × 20 1/16 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Mrs. George T. Langhorne in memory of Edward Carson Waller

Reference Number

1963.760

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.

https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/93433/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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