Lost at Sea Portrait Black Boy on Boat Art
| The Gulf Stream | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Winslow Homer  |
| Year | 1899 |
| Medium | oil pigment, canvas |
| Motility | Realism, Naturalism |
| Dimensions | 71.4 cm (28.1 in) × 124.8 cm (49.1 in) |
| Location | Metropolitan Museum of Art |
| Identifiers | The Met object ID: 11122 |
| Website | www |
The Gulf Stream is an 1899 oil painting past Winslow Homer. It shows a man in a small dismasted rudderless angling boat struggling against the waves of the body of water, and was the artist'due south statement on a theme that had interested him for more than than a decade.[1] [2] Homer vacationed frequently in Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean.
Background [edit]
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 twelvemonth, including a pencil drawing of a dismasted boat, a big watercolor The Derelict (Sharks), and a larger watercolor of the forrad part of the boat, Report for "The Gulfstream".[three] A later watercolor report 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 afterward appropriated for The Gulfstream of 1889,[four] and a watercolor of 1899 entitled After the Hurricane, in which a figure lies unconscious abreast his beached gunkhole, represents the finale of the watercolor narrative of human confronting nature.[v]
After the Hurricane, painted by Homer in 1899, depicts a man washed up on a beach after a storm.
Another possible inspiration for the series of watercolors and The Gulf Stream itself was McCabe's Curse, a Bahamian tale about a British Helm McCabe who in 1814 was robbed past thieves, hired a small boat in hopes of reaching a nearby isle, merely was caught in a tempest and after died in Nassau of yellow fever; Homer saved an account of the story and pasted it into a travel guide.[4]
A visit to Nassau and Florida between December 1898 and February 1899 immediately preceded the final painting.[6] Homer began work on the painting by September 1899, at which time he wrote: "I painted in water colors iii months concluding wintertime at Nassau, & have now just commenced arranging a picture from some of the studies."[7] 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 yr after the decease of his father, and has been seen as revealing his sense of abandonment or vulnerability.[6]
Exhibition and reaction [edit]
In 1900, Homer sent The Gulf Stream to Philadelphia to exist exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, afterward 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)."[viii] In fact, comparing with an early photograph of the painting shows that Homer not simply reworked the ocean, but changed the starboard gunwale by breaking it, added the canvass and the red nuance of color near the waterline, made the gunkhole's proper noun (Anna – Key West) conspicuously legible, and painted in the transport at the upper left horizon[8]—mayhap to mitigate the sense of desolation in the piece of work. He then showed the painting at the Carnegie Establish in Pittsburgh, and asked $4,000 for it.[8]
In 1906, The Gulf Stream was exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and all the members of the academy'due south jury petitioned the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art to purchase the painting.[9] Paper reviews of the piece of work were mixed;[9] it was seen every bit more than melodramatic than Homer's usual work. A reviewer in Philadelphia noted that viewers had laughed at the painting, which he referred to every bit "Smiling Sharks", describing the scene every bit "a naked negro lying in a boat while a school of sharks [are] waltzing around him in the about ludicrous manner". Some other contemporary critic wrote that The Gulf Stream "displays a sure improvidence of interest seldom seen in the canvases of [Homer's] best manner".[10] The museum bought the painting the aforementioned year.
Interpretation and influences [edit]
Homer'southward intentions for The Gulf Stream are opaque. The painting has been described equally "a specially enigmatic and tantalizing episode, a marine puzzle that floats forever in a region of unsolved mysteries."[11] Bryson Burroughs, a sometime curator at the Metropolitan Museum, noted that it "assumes the proportion of a smashing allegory if one chooses".[12] Its drama is of a romantic and heroic vein, the man stoically resigned to fate, surrounded past anecdotal detail reminiscent of Homer'southward early illustrative works.[8]
When a viewer requested an explanation for the narrative, Homer adequately bristled in response:
I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any clarification....I have crossed the Gulf Stream ten times & I should know something well-nigh it. The boat & sharks are outside matters of very little consequence. They accept been blown out to sea by a hurricane. Yous can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who now is and so mazed & parboiled, will exist rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily.[13] [fourteen]
The painting alludes to John Singleton Copley'southward 1778 composition, Watson and the Shark, also as a scattering of dramatic marine paintings of the 19th century.[6] In American Visions: The Ballsy History of Art in America, Robert Hughes contrasts Homer'southward picture with Copley's. While Copley's shark jaw is conflicting in form and most probable fatigued from second-hand accounts, Homer's—attributable to the artist's familiarity with the bailiwick—correctly captures the sharks' beefcake. 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, cleaved mast, solitary figure, looming water spout, and open ocean give a sense of abandonment. The ship at far left is and then distant as to suggest that gild, while nowadays, is completely unattainable; it presents the viewer with a and so-close-yet-and so-far state of affairs. These two paintings dissimilarity in their immediacy besides. In Watson and the Shark there is constant motion: the gunkhole moving forward, the downward thrust of the spear, the two men reaching downward for the victim, and finally the shark which extends off the sheet. In Homer's painting, the scene is more static: the sharks seem to swim slowly around the boat which lolls in a trough betwixt waves.
References to other 19th-century paintings, including The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix, The Slave Ship by J. M. Due west. Turner, and The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole have been noted every bit well.[half-dozen] These iii paintings (in the example of the Delacroix, a preliminary written report) were in i of the finest public art collections in America in the mid 19th century, that of John Taylor Johnston of New York, and it is probable that Homer was familiar with the paintings; one of his own works, Prisoners from the Front, was in the same collection.[16] For art historian Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., The Gulf Stream is more than richly informed by these artistic predecessors than by Homer's direct experiences at sea, with the circumvoluted sharks derived from the tortured souls of The Barque of Dante, the dramatic bounding main and sky inspired by The Slave Ship, and the "mode of pictorial utterance" akin to The Voyage of Life.[15]
Elements in the painting accept been interpreted equally possessing funereal references: in addition to the black cross in the boat's bow, the open up hatch (representing a tomb), ropes (for lowering the body), cleaved mast and torn canvas (shroud) have been cited for symbolic meanings.[17] By contrast, the gunkhole in Homer's painting Breezing Up (A Off-white Air current) of 1876 featured an anchor in its bow, symbolic of promise.[17] The sailor in The Gulf Stream ignores these allusions, as he pays no listen to the sharks, waterspout, nor the transport in the distance, and inverts the optimism of the romantic masterpiece Raft of the Medusa painted earlier in the century by Théodore Géricault.[17]
Homer biographer Albert Ten Eyck Gardner believed The Gulf Stream was the creative person'south greatest painting, and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann called it "ane of the greatest pictures ever painted in America".[11] Afterwards assessments have been more than critical of the "near excessive pathos of the drama."[8] John Updike thought the painting "famous but on the edge of the absurd, with its overkill of sharks and waterspout".[xviii] For Sidney Kaplan, a scholar on black American culture, The Gulf Stream is the "masterpiece of the blackness image—the deathless Negro waiting stoically, Homerically for his end between waterspout and white-bellied shark."[12] Peter H. Wood has written a book interpreting the painting as an apologue of the situation of blacks in America during the slave merchandise and later on.[xix] The painting is referenced in a verse form in the novel, This Ruler. In the book it is an allegory for the plight of teachers in American schools.[20]
The painting is referenced in Derek Walcott's Omeros, where the poem's narrator encounters the piece of work on a visit to an unnamed museum and identifies the man in the painting with his character, Achille, referring to the painter every bit 'some other Homer'.[21]
Notes [edit]
- ^ Cooper, 217
- ^ "Winslow Homer – The Gulf Stream – The Met".
- ^ Cikovsky, 382
- ^ a b Cooper, 143
- ^ Cooper, 215–216
- ^ a b c d Cikovsky, 369
- ^ Spassky, 35–37
- ^ a b c d e Spassky, 37
- ^ a b Spassky, 39
- ^ Griffin, Randall C. Homer, Eakins & Anshutz: the search for American identity in the gilded age, p. 103. Penn Country Press, 2004. ISBN 0-271-02329-v
- ^ a b Gardner, 211
- ^ a b Spassky, 41
- ^ Spassky, 38–39
- ^ Cikovsky, Nicolai; Kelly, Franklin; Homer, Winslow; (U.Due south.), National Gallery of Art; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts (1995). Winslow Homer. Yale Academy Press. p. 307. ISBN0300065558 – via Google Books.
- ^ a b Cikovsky, 370
- ^ Cikovsky, 369–370
- ^ a b c Cikovsky, 383
- ^ Updike, John. Still Looking: Essays on American Fine art, p. 67. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1997. ISBN 1400044189
- ^ Wood, Peter H. Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer'due south Gulf Stream (Mercer Academy Lamar Memorial Lectures), University of Georgia Press (2004). ISBN 0820326259
- ^ Duff, Mark (2019). This Ruler. United states: Mark Duff. p. 12. ISBN978-0578476315.
- ^ Walcott, Derek. Omeros, XXXVI, ii.
References [edit]
- Cikovsky Jr., Nicolai; Kelly, Franklin. (1995). Winslow Homer. National Gallery of Art, Washington. ISBN 0-89468-217-2
- Cooper, Helen A. Winslow Homer Watercolors. National Gallery of Art, Washington: 1986. ISBN 0-300-03695-7
- Gardner, Albert Ten Eyck. Winslow Homer, American Artist: his World and his Piece of work. Clarkson Northward. Potter, Inc., New York: 1961.[ ISBN missing ]
- Hughes, Robert, American visions: the ballsy history of art in America. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1997.[ ISBN missing ]
- Spassky, Natalie. Winslow Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New York: Bound, 1982.[ ISBN missing ]
- Essay on The Gulf Stream
- Md file of Winslow Homer's "Gulf Stream": An Creative person Looks at Racism, Segregation, and the Spanish American War in the 1890s by Peter H. Wood
- Forest, Peter H. "Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer'south Gulf Stream (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures)," University of Georgia Press (2004). ISBN 0820326259
External links [edit]
- The Gulf Stream entry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_Stream_%28painting%29
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