Winslow Homer: Artist and Angler

Homer's reputation has been on the rise lately, with his quintessentially ""American"" watercolors and drawings the subjects of major retrospectives revealing the breadth of his achievement. This volume takes a narrower look, by focusing on the place of fish and fishing in Homer's life and work. Junker is curator of paintings and sculpture at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and Burns is a professor of fine arts at Indiana University, Bloomington. This catalogue accompanies their co-curated exhibition of the same name, opening in December 2002 in San Francisco before moving on to Fort Worth. It covers everything from Homer's fishing camp in Prout's Neck, Maine, to the trout illustrations from which Homer copped some of his pictorial fish. Of its 184 illustrations, 123 are in color, with an emphasis on full-page reproduction of watercolors, including The Angler (1874), showing a raffish, bearded man casting with panache into a cascading river. While the quality of the scholarship is undeniable, this book's appeal will likely be limited to piscatorially inclined figurative art enthusiasts-which, judging from the amount of cable TV devoted to fishing and painting, may not be an insignificant demographic.