"just a painter of postcards"

- Canaletto [1697-1768]

not quite humiliated

... but embarrassed.

Winslow Homer failed to sell. He was thought of as the brooding, solitude, reclusive artist. 

battle field to wheat field

A Civil War veteran returns to the field. 

misanthrope

The Gulf Stream, 1899

"We're all alone on a battered boat, adrift. The figure could be any of us."

Winslow Homer [1836-1910] is regarded by many as America's greatest painter.

Homer might have been inspired by Géricault [1791-1824] here.

self-taught

Winslow Homer [1836-1910], Prisoners from the Front [1866]

Preeminent 19th century American painter.

"Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems."

"What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work in the right way."

The material that Homer collected as an artist-correspondent during the Civil War provided the subjects for his first oil paintings. In 1866, one year after the war ended and four years after he reputedly began to paint in oil, Homer completed this picture, a work that established his reputation. It represents an actual scene from the war in which a Union officer, Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow (1834–1896), captured several Confederate officers on June 21, 1864. The background depicts the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia. Infrared photography and numerous studies indicate that the painting underwent many changes in the course of completion. [source: Metropolitan Museum of Art]