The Gulf Stream, 1899
"Winslow Homer loved a good
repoussoir: Locking the foreground and background into a taut tug-of-war charged his small paintings with titanic vigor. Rocks, waves, boats, and leaping fish bound toward the viewer, while some kind of natural force draws the eye back into the painting. That push-and-pull is emotional as well as compositional: We do not know whether to sympathize with or ridicule his subjects. What, then, are we to make of the
repoussoir in Winslow Homer’s
The Gulf Stream, 1899: a dark, red-flecked wave swelling in the foreground and teeming with criss-crossing sharks? Based on sketches and watercolors made during the artist’s visits to the Bahamas and Florida in 1884 and 1898, the work is the centerpiece of
'Crosscurrents,' one of the largest reconsiderations of Homer in a lifetime, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ..."
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