On the Stile

Winslow Homer

Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on wove paper

Metropolitan Museum of Art

On the Stile is a small but refined watercolor, gouache, and graphite work on wove paper in which a young girl and boy navigate a wooden farm fence together, their hands joined across the stile's steps. The girl, dressed in a long white ruffled dress and straw hat, stands on the near side of the fence, while the boy in tan overalls and a wide-brimmed hat steps down on the far side, both silhouetted against a broad expanse of celery-green field and a light blue hill. The work was produced during Homer's highly productive 1878 season at Houghton Farm in upstate New York, the country estate of his patron Lawson Valentine, where he created approximately fifty watercolors centered on rural life and children. As one of the foremost painters of nineteenth-century America, Homer brought to this modest sheet the same direct observation of nature, luminous handling of transparent washes, and unsentimental realism that defined his watercolor practice throughout the 1870s.