The Gulf Stream is an 1899 oil painting by Winslow Homer.[1] It shows a man in a small dismasted rudderless fishing boat struggling against the storm-tossed waves and perils of the sea, presumably near the Gulf Stream, and was the artist's statement on a theme that had interested him for more than a decade.[2][3] During the time he explored this theme, Homer, a New Englander, boated often near Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean.
Homer crossed the Gulf Stream numerous times; his first trip to the Caribbean in 1885 seems to have inspired several related works dated from the same year, including a pencil drawing of a dismasted boat, a large watercolor The Derelict (Sharks), and a larger watercolor of the forward part of the boat, Study for "The Gulfstream".[4] A later watercolor study was The Gulfstream of 1889, in which the disabled boat now includes a sailor and flailing shark. Additionally, there are other related watercolors; the shark in Shark Fishing of 1885 was later appropriated for The Gulfstream of 1889,[5] and a watercolor of 1899 entitled After the Hurricane (also known as, After the Hurricane, Bahamas), in which a figure lies unconscious beside his beached boat, with waves and sky suggesting the aftermath of a storm, represents the finale of the watercolor narrative of man against nature.[6]
After the Hurricane, painted by Homer in 1899, perhaps as the sequel to The Gulf Stream, "is among Homer’s most astonishing and ambitious watercolors for its sheer technical virtuosity and epic subject matter"
Another possible inspiration for the series of watercolors and The Gulf Stream itself was McCabe's Curse, a Bahamian tale about a British Captain McCabe who in 1814 was robbed by thieves, hired a small boat in hopes of reaching a nearby island, but was caught in a storm and later died in Nassau of yellow fever; Homer saved an account of the story and pasted it into a travel guide.[5]
A visit to Nassau and Florida between December 1898 and February 1899 immediately preceded the final painting.[8] Homer began work on the painting by September 1899, at which time he wrote: "I painted in water colors three months last winter at Nassau, & have now just commenced arranging a picture from some of the studies."[9] Chronologically the first of a series of major works painted by Homer in the last decade of his life, The Gulf Stream was painted in the penultimate year of the century, the year after the death of his father, and has been seen as revealing his sense of abandonment or vulnerability.[8]
Exhibition and reaction
In 1900, Homer sent The Gulf Stream to Philadelphia to be exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, after it was returned later that year he wrote "I have painted on the picture since it was in Philadelphia and improved it very much (more of the Deep Sea water than before)."[10] In fact, comparison with an early photograph of the painting shows that Homer not only reworked the ocean, but changed the starboard gunwale by breaking it, added the sail and the red dash of color near the waterline, made the boat's name (Anna – Key West) clearly legible, and painted in the ship at the upper left horizon[10]—possibly to mitigate the sense of desolation in the work. He then showed the painting at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and asked $4,000 for it.[10]
In 1906, The Gulf Stream was exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and all the members of the academy's jury petitioned the Metropolitan Museum of Art to purchase the painting.[11] Newspaper reviews of the work were mixed;[11] it was seen as more melodramatic than Homer's usual work. A reviewer in Philadelphia noted that viewers had laughed at the painting, which he referred to as "Smiling Sharks", describing the scene as "a naked negro lying in a boat while a school of sharks [are] waltzing around him in the most ludicrous manner". Another contemporary critic wrote that The Gulf Stream "displays a certain diffusion of interest seldom seen in the canvases of [Homer's] best manner".[12] The museum bought the painting the same year.
Homer's intentions for The Gulf Stream are opaque. The painting has been described as "a particularly enigmatic and tantalizing episode, a marine puzzle that floats forever in a region of unsolved mysteries."[13] Bryson Burroughs, a onetime curator at the Metropolitan Museum, noted that it "assumes the proportion of a great allegory if one chooses".[14] Its drama is of a romantic and heroic vein, the man stoically resigned to fate, surrounded by anecdotal detail reminiscent of Homer's early illustrative works.[10]
When a viewer requested an explanation for the narrative, Homer fairly bristled in response:
I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description....I have crossed the Gulf Stream ten times & I should know something about it. The boat & sharks are outside matters of very little consequence. They have been blown out to sea by a hurricane. You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who now is so dazed & parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily.[15][16]
The painting alludes to John Singleton Copley's 1778 composition, Watson and the Shark, as well as a handful of dramatic marine paintings of the 19th century.[8] In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Robert Hughes contrasts Homer's picture with Copley's. While Copley's shark jaw is alien in form and most likely drawn from second-hand accounts, Homer's—owing to the artist's familiarity with the subject—correctly captures the sharks' anatomy. Secondly, in Copley's version, a rescue is imminent: the horizon is near and light in tone, and many boats, within the harbor and probably docked, are seen in the background. Homer's version, with its circling sharks, broken mast, lone figure, looming water spout, and open sea give a sense of abandonment. The ship at far left is so distant as to suggest that society, while present, is completely unattainable; it presents the viewer with a so-close-yet-so-far situation. These two paintings contrast in their immediacy as well. In Watson and the Shark there is constant movement: the boat moving forward, the downward thrust of the spear, the two men reaching down for the victim, and finally the shark which extends off the canvas. In Homer's painting, the scene is more static: the sharks seem to swim slowly around the boat which lolls in a trough between waves.
References to other 19th-century paintings, including The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix, The Slave Ship by J. M. W. Turner, and The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole have been noted as well.[8] These three paintings (in the case of the Delacroix, a preliminary study) were in one of the finest public art collections in America in the mid 19th century, that of John Taylor Johnston of New York, and it is likely that Homer was familiar with the paintings; one of his own works, Prisoners from the Front, was in the same collection.[18] For art historian Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., The Gulf Stream is more richly informed by these artistic predecessors than by Homer's direct experiences at sea, with the circling sharks derived from the tortured souls of The Barque of Dante, the dramatic sea and sky inspired by The Slave Ship, and the "mode of pictorial utterance" akin to The Voyage of Life.[17]
Elements in the painting have been interpreted as possessing funereal references: in addition to the black cross in the boat's bow, the open hatch (representing a tomb), ropes (for lowering the body), broken mast and torn sail (shroud) have been cited for symbolic meanings.[19] By contrast, the boat in Homer's painting Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) of 1876 featured an anchor in its bow, symbolic of hope.[19] The sailor in The Gulf Stream ignores these allusions, as he pays no heed to the sharks, waterspout, nor the ship in the distance, and inverts the optimism of the romantic masterpiece Raft of the Medusa painted earlier in the century by Théodore Géricault.[19]
Homer biographer Albert Ten Eyck Gardner believed The Gulf Stream was the artist's greatest painting, and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann called it "one of the greatest pictures ever painted in America".[13] Later assessments have been more critical of the "almost excessive pathos of the drama."[10]John Updike thought the painting "famous but on the edge of the absurd, with its overkill of sharks and waterspout".[20] For Sidney Kaplan, a scholar on black American culture, The Gulf Stream is the "masterpiece of the black image—the deathless Negro waiting stoically, Homerically for his end between waterspout and white-bellied shark."[14] Peter H. Wood has written a book interpreting the painting as an allegory of the situation of blacks in America during the slave trade and afterwards.[21] The painting is referenced in a poem in the novel, This Ruler. In the book it is an allegory for the plight of teachers in American schools.[22]
The painting is referenced in Derek Walcott's Omeros, where the poem's narrator encounters the work on a visit to an unnamed museum and identifies the man in the painting with his character, Achille, referring to the painter as 'another Homer'.[23]
↑ Cikovsky, Nicolai; Kelly, Franklin; Homer, Winslow; (U.S.), National Gallery of Art; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts (1995). Winslow Homer. Yale University Press. p.307. ISBN0300065558– via Google Books.
↑ Updike, John. Still Looking: Essays on American Art, p. 67. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1997. ISBN1400044189
↑ Wood, Peter H. Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures), University of Georgia Press (2004). ISBN0820326259
George Inness was a prominent American landscape painter.
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters of 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art in general.
Frank Weston Benson, frequently referred to as Frank W. Benson, was an American artist from Salem, Massachusetts known for his Realistic portraits, American Impressionist paintings, watercolors and etchings. He began his career painting portraits of distinguished families and murals for the Library of Congress. Some of his best known paintings depict his daughters outdoors at Benson's summer home, Wooster Farm, on the island of North Haven, Maine. He also produced numerous oil, wash and watercolor paintings and etchings of wildfowl and landscapes.
Watson and the Shark is an oil painting by the Anglo-American painter John Singleton Copley, depicting the rescue of the English boy Brook Watson from a shark attack in Havana, Cuba. Copley, then living in London, painted three versions, which are all now in the United States. The 1778 version is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. A second, full-size 1778 replica is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a third, smaller, 1782 version with a more vertical composition is in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, commonly known as The Oxbow, is a seminal American landscape painting by Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School. The 1836 painting depicts a Romantic panorama of the Connecticut River Valley just after a thunderstorm. It has been interpreted as a confrontation between wilderness and civilization.
Marine art or maritime art is a form of figurative art that portrays or draws its main inspiration from the sea. Maritime painting is a genre that depicts ships and the sea—a genre particularly strong from the 17th to 19th centuries. In practice the term often covers art showing shipping on rivers and estuaries, beach scenes and all art showing boats, without any rigid distinction - for practical reasons subjects that can be drawn or painted from dry land in fact feature strongly in the genre. Strictly speaking "maritime art" should always include some element of human seafaring, whereas "marine art" would also include pure seascapes with no human element, though this distinction may not be observed in practice.
Eight Bells is an 1886 oil painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts two sailors determining their ship's latitude. It is one of Homer's best-known paintings and the last of his major paintings of the 1880s that dramatically chronicle man's relationship to the ocean.
Right and Left is a 1909 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a pair of common goldeneye ducks at the moment they are hit by a hunter's shotgun blast as they attempt to take flight. Completed less than two years before his death, it was Homer's last great painting, and has been the subject of a variety of interpretations regarding its origin, composition and meaning. As with his other late masterworks, it represents a return to the sporting and hunting subjects of Homer's earlier years, and was to be his final engagement with the theme. Its design recalls that of Japanese art, and the composition resembles that of a colored engraving by John James Audubon.
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) is an oil painting by American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a catboat called the Gloucester chopping through that city's harbor under "a fair wind" (Homer's original title). Inside the boat are a man, three boys, and their catch.
The Fox Hunt is an 1893 oil on canvas painting by Winslow Homer. It depicts a fox running in deep snow, menaced by hungry crows. His largest single work, it has been described as "Homer's greatest Darwinian painting, arguably his greatest painting of any kind."
The Boat Builders is an oil painting on panel executed in 1873 by American landscape painter Winslow Homer. It is held in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States.
The Cotton Pickers is an 1876 oil painting by Winslow Homer. It depicts two young African-American women in a cotton field.
Stately, silent and with barely a flicker of sadness on their faces, the two black women in the painting are unmistakable in their disillusionment: they picked cotton before the war and they are still picking cotton afterward.
The Fog Warning is one of several paintings on marine subjects by the late-19th-century American painter Winslow Homer (1836–1910). Together with The Herring Net and Breezing Up, painted the same year and also depicting the hard lives of fishermen in Maine, it is considered among his best works on such topics.
Northeaster is one of several paintings on marine subjects by the late-19th-century American painter Winslow Homer. Like The Fog Warning and Breezing Up, he created it during his time in Maine. It is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Viewers are presented a struggle of elements between the sea and the rocky shore. Winslow Homer excelled in painting landscape paintings that depicted seascapes and mountain scenery.
Fishing Boats, Key West is a 1903 watercolor and graphite drawing by Winslow Homer. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Washington Crossing the Delaware is the title of three 1851 oil-on-canvas paintings by the German-American artist Emanuel Leutze.
The Veteran in a New Field is an oil-on-canvas painting by the 19th-century American artist Winslow Homer. It is set in the aftermath of the American Civil War and is often interpreted as an emblem of postwar American society. The painting depicts a farmer harvesting wheat in a field with a scythe. The farmer in the painting is identified as a former Union Soldier from his discarded jacket and canteen in the right foreground of the painting. This painting was one of several that Homer did on the American Civil War, including his previous works Home, Sweet Home and Prisoners from the Front. The Veteran in a New Field is a transitional painting in Homer's body of work. It comments on the postwar return of soldiers to daily life and the history of death that they bring along with them. It uses biblical themes to comment on war and nature, while also alluding to stories from classical history.
Tornado over Kansas, or simply The Tornado, is a 1929 oil-on-canvas painting by the American Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry. It depicts a dramatic scene in which a family races for shelter as a tornado approaches their farm, and has compositional connections to Curry's earlier 1928 painting Baptism in Kansas. The artist is believed to have been influenced by Baroque art and photographs of tornadoes. He developed a fear of natural disasters and a reverence towards God during his childhood, both of which are apparent in the painting.
Grace Hoops is a genre painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts two young women outdoors playing the game of graces. Scenes of childhood innocence constituted one of Homer's recurring subjects throughout the 1870s. The work is now in the collection of the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, having been donated as part of the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch collection.
References
Cikovsky Jr., Nicolai; Kelly, Franklin. (1995). Winslow Homer. National Gallery of Art, Washington. ISBN0-89468-217-2
Cooper, Helen A. Winslow Homer Watercolors. National Gallery of Art, Washington: 1986. ISBN0-300-03695-7
Gardner, Albert Ten Eyck. Winslow Homer, American Artist: his World and his Work. Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., New York: 1961. [ISBNmissing]
Hughes, Robert, American visions: the epic history of art in America. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1997. [ISBNmissing]
Spassky, Natalie. Winslow Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New York: Spring, 1982. [ISBNmissing]
Wood, Peter H. "Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures)," University of Georgia Press (2004). ISBN0820326259
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