When he was six his family moved to Cambridge; and thereabouts, in the woods and streams, he hunted, fished, and developed a love for out-of-door life that never left him. There, too, he went to school and put forth his first drawings. There is a drawing extant, done when he was eleven years old, called the “Beetle and the Wedge”[6]--a drawing of boys at play--that Kenyon Cox praises highly, saying that “the essential Winslow Homer, the master of weight and movement, is already here by implication.” It is certainly a remarkable drawing, for it shows not only observation but skill of hand beyond a boy of eleven. Moreover, one is rather surprised at the economy of means employed. It is done easily, with a few strokes, as though the boy-artist had unusual knowledge of form. [6] Published in Downes, _Life and Works of Winslow Homer_, Boston, 1911. The father was evidently pleased with the son’s after-efforts, for at nineteen the youth was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer by the name of Bufford. He started at work without any lessons in drawing and was soon making designs for title-pages of sheet-music and working somewhat upon figures. A wood-engraver named Damereau gave him some hints about drawing on the block, and in the two years that he remained with Bufford he must have picked up much information about drawing for illustration, for at twenty-one he had set up a shop of his own and was making illustrations for _Ballou’s Pictorial_, _Harper’s Weekly_, and other periodicals. The experience as an illustrator no doubt taught him exact observation, precision in outline drawing, conciseness in statement, and the value of the essential feature. So impressive was this early education that it remained with him and influenced him to the end. He was always an observer and an illustrator. One of his canvases left unfinished at his death, “Shooting the Rapids,” now in the Metropolitan Museum, is primarily an illustration of Adirondack life. It is something more, to be sure, but the point to be noted just here is that the early inclination was never wholly changed. He never became subjective, never intentionally put himself into any of his works. He merely reported what he saw from the point of view of an illustrator. He came to New York to live in 1859 and attended the night classes at the Academy of Design. There he no doubt improved his drawing. It is said that he also received instruction from Rondel, a Frenchman, and in the Paris Exposition of 1890 he was catalogued as a “pupil of Rondel”; but there must have been some jest behind it, for Homer received only four lessons from Rondel. He was not the man to take lessons from any one. From the beginning he was too self-reliant, too self-centred, to be led very far afield by another’s method or opinion.