Girl Holding a Drinking Glass

This sketch by Winslow Homer depicts a young woman in period dress, rendered in the artist's characteristic ink line technique. Homer's work in illustrated journalism during the 1860s helped establish visual conventions that would shape American comics: clear linear drawing, economical gesture, and narrative immediacy. As a pioneering illustrator for *Harper's Weekly*, Homer developed the visual language of sequential storytelling that newspaper pages demanded—direct characterization through pose and expression, reproducible line work, and compositions that read quickly. His figure studies demonstrate the foundation of comic art: the ability to convey personality and action through drawing alone, techniques that became essential vocabulary for the comic strip artists who followed in the twentieth century.