Adirondacks Guide 1892

Winslow Homer created this watercolor, Adirondacks Guide, during one of his frequent sojourns in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. His images of the region coincided with a growing appreciation of wilderness, the rise of tourism, and new ideas about leisure. Homer’s guide evokes this changing relationship with nature, showing an outdoorsman in his element, navigating a canoe on the lake. But it also asks us to think about the commodification of nature as a spectacle. The guide himself would have been a local working man whose knowledge and labor enabled the tourist's experience. In this image, the guide’s taciturn expression complicates any romanticization of the wilderness. To learn more, look into local histories and tourist ephemera from the period. By placing this image within its social and economic context, we can better understand how it reflects both admiration for and a critical view of America’s changing landscape.