A Clam-Bake (1873): Art, History and Details

A Clam-Bake (1873) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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 watercolors. His early watercolors, 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 colored line drawings. Homer later combined the composition of this watercolor with other sketches to produce the illustration A Clam-Bake, which appeared in Harper's Weekly on August 23, 1873.

Object facts

• Title: A Clam-Bake
• Date: 1873
• Creator attribution: Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor, gouache, and graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 19.7 x 34.6 cm (7 3/4 x 13 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1945.229

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Homer H. Johnson

Further reading listed by the museum

• Burchfield, Louise. "Paintings by Winslow Homer." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 33, no. 9 (November 1946): 165-167.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.