"Both during and since his lifetime, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) has been acknowledged as a great American master, whose productive career as a graphic artist, oil painter, and watercolorist spanned the second half of the nineteenth century into the first decade of the twentieth. All but one of the works illustrated here date from the 1870s, the central decade of Homer's life and a critical one in his development into a mature artist. These pictures comprise all the essential images of his art during this period, and some are related to key works in the artist's oeuvre. One watercolor, Berry Pickers, is arguably among the half-dozen greatest pieces of his output dating from this decade. Among the themes concerning Homer at this time were the position of blacks in American society at the close of the Civil War, women in rural and leisure settings, children or youths on the threshold of maturity, issues of sexual opposition and tension, and portraiture, the latter a subject not commonly associated with Homer's art"--Back cover.