Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Fishing Boats, Key West, 1903. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 1910 25 x 32 inches Father's Day gift, dad Father's Day gift, dad Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art. Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. Homer’s visit to Key West, Florida, in 1903 produced a brilliant new series recording the dazzling light and turquoise water of the tropics. Dropping clean water into his washes to make them lighten and blur, he continued to simplify his palette, relying on only three colors—blue, burnt sienna, and his familiar vermilion—added to black, which settles out in grainy washes suggesting shadow and cloud. Expertly, he reserved zones of white paper to read as the sails and the hull of the Lizzie.