A Snow Slide in the City

A Snow Slide in the City by Winslow Homer, created in 1860, is a lively wood engraving that captures a popular winter pastime in nineteenth-century American urban life. Before gaining fame for his oil paintings, Winslow Homer established his career as a highly skilled illustrator, contributing thousands of images to illustrated magazines like Harper's Weekly. This specific print showcases a dynamic genre scene, where children and young adults capitalize on accumulated snow, turning a steep city street or embankment into a spirited playground for sledding and sliding.

The medium of wood engraving, prevalent throughout the United States before the widespread adoption of photo-mechanical reproduction, allowed Homer to distribute detailed and timely images to a mass audience. Homer’s skillful execution conveys a sense of depth and movement, using precise, dense lines characteristic of the technique to delineate figures in motion and the textures of the urban environment. The focus on everyday activities highlights the artist’s early commitment to realism and his keen observation of American social customs.

This work belongs to a significant body of early prints that chronicle the cultural landscape of the 1860s, a period immediately preceding the Civil War. Homer’s detailed observation and journalistic approach elevated scenes of leisure and labor, ensuring that such visual records were widely circulated. Today, this important example of 19th-century American printmaking is preserved in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA).