2-722-020 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

A Clam-Bake, 1873. During the first part of his career, Winslow Homer supported himself as an illustrator, but in the early 1870s he found that he could make a good living through the sale of his watercolours. His early watercolours, such as this one of boys on a beach at Gloucester, Massachusetts, show a tentative use of the technique and often have the effect of coloured line drawings. Homer later combined the composition of this watercolour with other sketches to produce the illustration A Clam-Bake, which appeared in Harper's Weekly on August 23, 1873.