On February 24, 1836, Winslow Homer was born in Boston, beginning a life that would extend across seven decades and leave behind a substantial body of work in painting, printmaking, illustration, and photography. He died on September 29, 1910, at Prouts Neck, Maine, having spent his final years on that coastal stretch of the northeastern United States.

Homer was educated at the Art Students League of New York, and his career came to be associated with realism and, more precisely, with American realism. He worked across several genres — marine art, portraiture, and genre painting among them — producing work that ranged from scenes of everyday life to the larger, more elemental subject matter of sea and coast. That breadth is visible in the titles he left behind: The Watermelon Boys and Sunlight and Shadow speak to his engagement with genre subjects, while Sandy Beach with Breakers places him squarely within the tradition of marine art that defined a significant portion of his output.

Among his other notable works, The Butterfly and The Yellow Jacket further document the variety of his practice. Alongside his painting, Homer worked as a printmaker and as an illustrator, and he also practiced photography, making him an image-maker who moved between media rather than confining himself to a single discipline. His connection to realism ran through all of it, grounding his work in observed subjects and concrete particulars rather than idealized forms.

Homer spent his later years at Prouts Neck, the Maine location where he also died in 1910 at the age of seventy-four. His practice as a painter and printmaker, his training at the Art Students League of New York, and the works he produced across genres — from marine canvases such as Sandy Beach with Breakers to genre pieces such as The Watermelon Boys — constitute the documented record of a career sustained by American realism and shaped by a persistent engagement with the visible world.