A Fisherman's Daughter (1873): Art, History and Details

A Fisherman's Daughter (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:

Homer created some of the most luminous and influential watercolors in the history of the medium. A Fisherman’s Daughter, painted in Gloucester, Massachusetts, is among a group of works that represent his first sustained use of the medium. Here, three girls sit on the shore of a sunlit beach and play with a lobster. Their downcast eyes suggest a solemn tranquility to their activity. The life of the local fishermen was perilous; they often spent weeks away from home and were sometimes lost at sea. Thus, waiting was a central part of life for Gloucester families. An overturned boat on the dunes behind the figures evokes the ominous form of a coffin.

Object facts

• Title: A Fisherman's Daughter
• Date: 1873
• Creator attribution: Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor and gouache over graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 24.2 x 32.9 cm (9 1/2 x 12 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1943.660

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Conrads, Margaret C., and Winslow Homer. Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press in association with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2001.
• Burchfield, Louise H. “An Early Water Color by Winslow Homer.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 31, no. 7 (September 1944): 141–142, 145. Published as: Girls with Lobster
• Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.

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.