Girl with Hay Rake

Winslow Homer

Watercolor on wove paper

National Gallery of Art

Girl with Hay Rake is a small but quietly powerful watercolor depicting a young rural girl holding a hay rake, rendered with the directness and economy that distinguish Winslow Homer's finest work in the medium. Created in 1878, the work belongs to a celebrated body of watercolors Homer produced that summer at Houghton Farm in Mountainville, New York, the country estate of his patron Lawson Valentine, where rural children and farm life served as his primary subjects. Homer (1836–1910), largely self-taught and initially trained as a commercial illustrator, had by this period emerged as one of America's preeminent painters, deploying watercolor not as a preparatory tool but as a fully realized artistic medium in its own right. The work reflects his characteristic American Realist sensibility—unaffected, luminous, and attentive to light—and is representative of the Houghton Farm series that secured his critical breakthrough as a watercolorist at the American Water Color Society's 1879 annual exhibition.