Berry Pickers

Winslow Homer

Watercolor and gouache over graphite on wove paper

National Gallery of Art

Berry Pickers is a watercolor depicting a group of men, women, and children gathering berries in a sunlit coastal landscape, with lush green grass, wildflowers, scattered red berries, and a glimpse of blue water in the far distance. Executed in July 1873 during Homer's landmark summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the work belongs to the pivotal body of watercolors in which Homer committed seriously to the medium for the first time, bringing a fluid, confident hand to scenes of American rural and coastal life. Homer, a largely self-taught artist who began his career as a commercial illustrator before turning to oil and watercolor painting, was one of the foremost practitioners of American Realism in the nineteenth century. The painting's genre subject—figures engaged in the quiet rhythms of outdoor labor amid an open New England landscape—typifies the direct, unsentimental observation of everyday life that defined Homer's work throughout the 1870s.