(Massachusetts, Maine, 1836-1910) [plein air] study presumably for The Croquet Game, 1866, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, spurious signature lower right "Homer", oil on canvas with "C.W. Keenan" colorman stamp verso stretcher, 6-5/8 x 11-1/2 in.; original 19th century gilt wood and composition frame,. Notes: During the 1860's Winslow Homer painted and exhibited a number of croquet themed works. These include "A Game Of Croquet", 1866, in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery that this sketch directly references. Without a current Homer catalogue raisonne' committee we were unable to have this sketch vetted. However, it is intriguing to note an entry in the Record of Works by Winslow Homer, Volume I, page 361, that references Homer's croquet sketches in an exhibition at the Samuel Avery salesrooms that year: Three pictures of Mr. Homer may be seen at Mr. Avery's rooms in Broadway. They are all three very sketchy, rapidly painted in the "broadest" manner, and so we are sorry to see Mr. Homer's work always so slapdash,… but all these three, and more particularly the one called [The Waverly Oaks] are full of power and the evidences of power. Here is a painter, his pictures say, who can sit down what he imagines; can draw as well as think, and paint as well as dream, and who sees, moreover, much in common things that generally passes unseen or half seen. He is almost a colorist, just misses it, indeed, and there is reason to hope, will not miss it long…. These pictures, it should be remembered, are slight and unfinished studies in oil color; it is, as we have hinted, of questionable propriety to exhibit them as for sale but the painter's power over his subjects is as noticeable in these studies as it could be in more finished work. There is, we think, an error in the drawing of one of the figures in the croquet study, but yet how well the same figure is drawn, how powerfully- how the body is recognized inside the preposterous and unnatural dress! Indeed, as regards costume alone, these pictures ought to be taken care of that our descendants may see how the incredible female dress of the present-day actually did look when worn by active young women. And for the beauty of the pictures, it could hardly have been made to look so well in a picture.". Provenance: Private Collection oil sketch executed over a previously used canvas with no fluorescence, (the two paint layers were from the same period of time), original stretcher and tacking edge, light grime