The Beach at Long Branch

1869

Regarded as one of the great American Realists of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer is known primarily for his large body of works in oil and watercolor. However, he also had an early career as a freelance illustrator, making drawings for wood engravings that were reproduced in mass-circulation periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly. In 1998, the Brooklyn Museum received a generous gift of more than 250 wood-engraved illustrations by Homer from Harvey Isbitts.

Life at the seashore provided the subject for an elaborate two-page illustration, or “art supplement,” and its accompanying text:

Mr. Winslow Homer . . . gives us a picture of the ease and pleasurable abandon which accompany life at Long Branch. On the beach, more than anywhere else in the world, society throws aside its dignity. Men and women make children of themselves. Those in the water give themselves up to sport, frolicking with each other and with the waves, thoughtless of fashion and its formalities. . . . Our artist suggests an old poetic thought in the letters drawn, by a young girl, in the sand.