'Only death remains?' Sharks circle a drifting boat — and a survivor does the unexpected

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The wind picks up. The catboat's sail fills. The sea opens ahead. White foam rises to the surface. Looking up, dark clouds roll in — but there is no smell of rain, so they are welcome shade, nothing more. "Well, men. How does it feel?" the man at the rope asks again, playfully. The three boys who came along say nothing. They need not answer. They sit at ease, leaning and reclining, gazing into the distance — taking in a sky the color of sky, a sea the color of sea. Behind them, another sailing vessel sounds its horn. At their feet, a freshly caught fish flaps. Their chests swell. The boys' voyage is only just beginning. The world is this wide, and nothing has been decided yet. They can go anywhere, do anything. This, then, is a painting about hope. Its title is "Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)."

And then the wind blows again. The small boat's sail has long since been reduced to rags. The sea has not merely opened — it has been torn apart. Even the white foam looks ominous. The sky has turned a sickly yellow. A waterspout surges up on one side. "What can be done now," the man slumped against the hull mutters again. "Is death all that remains?" Again, there is no answer. None can be given. He simply turns away from the circling sharks and stares into the distance once more. A white sail, a dark cross, a slack rope — all evoke a grave and a funeral. The reddish haze drifting through the water leaves only a raw, unsettling aftertaste. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do. The earlier sea spoke of possibility. This sea speaks, in and of itself, of survival. Is this, then, a painting about despair? Its title is "The Gulf Stream."

Two paintings of opposite moods were made by the same hand. The first, full of anticipation, came from a vigorous man of about thirty-seven. The second, steeped in dejection, was the work of a man of sixty-three.

Winslow Homer — an American painter who taught himself to paint, yet rose to the very top of his country's art world, only to spend his final years living in such seclusion that he earned the nickname "Robinson Crusoe." What did Homer see, and what did he live through? How did both his life and his seascapes come to be turned so completely upside down? This is a story about how one painter — and, before that, one human being — came to see the world differently.

The setting is a battlefield of the American Civil War — the Rappahannock Valley, under the command of Union General Nelson A. Miles.

Afternoon sunlight filters through a break in the clouds. An orange tent cloth hangs stiff and dry. A pot over a burning fire sends up smoke, and hardtack on a tin plate glints like gold. In the foreground, two infantrymen rest — one standing still, one sitting with chin in hand, both lost in thought. One row back, a regimental band plays "Home, Sweet Home."

This is the account left by General Miles, reflecting on the scene the canvas depicts. Even in the damp of the trenches, music bloomed. Even with fates unknown from one day to the next, there were moments when everyone kept time together. For a war painting, it is a tender work. This is Homer's early canvas "Home, Sweet Home."

Homer also refused to paint the most harrowing scene of war — a surrender — according to the old conventions.

Union General Francis Channing Barlow stands with his hands clasped behind his back, dressed in a fine uniform. His expression is composed, the sword at his hip reassuring. A group of Confederate soldiers lowers their rifles to signal defeat — but they do not bow their heads. They meet the general's gaze directly. The young man at the far left has even thrust his hands into his pockets. There is something almost defiant in their bearing, as if to say: it is not you alone, but all of us together, who must rebuild this continent. Winner and loser are clearly divided, yet the distance between them does not look so great. Homer, once again, refused to paint the obvious. Rather than a picture that closes after the surrender, he offered one that hints at the need to build something together from this point forward. It was unmistakably an open-ended work. This early painting is titled "Prisoners from the Front."

Both canvases were conceived and completed when Homer was around thirty years old.

As noted in the discussion of "Breezing Up," Homer during this period painted primarily pictures of forward motion.

What he sought to scatter across his canvases was a spirit of growth and challenge, reconciliation and unity. Remarkably, Homer held to this artistic vision even after witnessing the Civil War firsthand as a correspondent for the New York-based magazine Harper's Weekly. While most of his peers in similar roles filled their writing and drawings with scattered blood and bodies, Homer knew how to press feeling and resonance into his work instead. The magazine's editorial policy — something along the lines of "don't paint anything too gruesome, it won't sell" — may have played a role, but his own convictions were strong from the start. That much can be inferred from the fact that Homer revised "Prisoners from the Front" repeatedly to achieve its open, unresolved atmosphere.

A flat canvas is no match for the three-dimensional world — yet Homer's paintings drew critical acclaim the moment they were shown. One reviewer praised him as "one of the few young artists who, with their very first exhibited work, have made their ability clearly felt" (of "Home, Sweet Home"). Art critic Peter Schjeldahl called "Prisoners from the Front" "the painting that tells us most about the Civil War." Homer was elected to the National Academy of Design at twenty-nine. He studied in Paris. His work was shown at the World's Fair.

The 1870s.

After the Civil War, Homer turned his eyes to the beautiful countryside and the young dreamers and growing children who lived there. Peace, vitality, and — amid the fading smell of gunpowder — the emergence of new possibility. The stage had changed, but Homer drew from the same emotional well as the battlefield paintings he had made before. His 1872 work "Snap the Whip" is a case in point. The world is fresh and green. Barefoot children push and pull at one another in play. The little ones grow more in daylight than in dark. What brushes their skin is a pleasant autumn breeze; what fills their ears is laughter. The fields hold a school, flowers and seeds, the scraped knees and bare soles of mischievous children. "Breezing Up" was painted around the same time — and carried particular weight given that it was completed in 1876, the centennial of American independence. The New York Tribune lavished praise on the painting, which shared "Snap the Whip"'s fresh spirit: "In no exhibition we remember have we seen a picture that could be compared with this." Both canvases offered comfort to Americans still raw from the war — a reassurance that the country could grow again, that it could move forward together. Homer's reputation rose accordingly.

Around this time, Homer also threw himself into watercolor.

In the early stages, some critics mocked him — suggesting a child with an ink bottle could do better. But after he produced polished works such as "The Blackboard" and "Schooner at Sunset," such talk disappeared entirely. Homer had, in fact, first made a name for himself as an illustrator, which spoke to the breadth of his artistic range. His foundations were anything but ordinary. Money began to accumulate as a matter of course. There was much he could do, and much he wanted to do. Homer's future? It looked as certain to stay vigorous as his paintings. But then...

Homer's skin was burned red.

The North Sea wind was fierce. The thick smell of salt stung the tip of his nose. There was no room for sentiment here — only prayer and superstition-laced custom.

In 1881, at the age of forty-five, Homer traveled to Cullercoats, a small fishing village on the English coast. There, confronted with the raw landscape, he was left speechless. Men and boys headed out to sea every morning. Women and girls knitted nets and cleaned the day's catch morning, noon and night. When the weather turned ugly, they would stop and press their palms together again and again, watching boats leave and return. There was little idle conversation among them. Warm sunshine and clear moonlight were rare. Every stone, every tree seemed to carry its own quiet sorrow. Yet every soul in this place was bound to the others with a closeness that could bring tears to the eyes. Perhaps, Homer thought, this is where the vast majority of ordinary people actually live. Whether that reflection led him to reconsider his own path is unknown — but what is certain is that his painting began to change from this point on.

Homer no longer painted pictures of simple peace and nostalgia.

He began putting onto canvas not play but labor, not harmony but the desperate moments where life and death hang in the balance. This continued after he relocated, a year and seven months later, to Prouts Neck, Maine — another rugged coastline lashed by a piercing sea wind. His home there was a converted stable just 75 feet (about 23 meters) from the shore.

Had Homer, then, simply crossed over in an instant from painter of hope to painter of despair?

From a single great shock? That reading seems too simple.

Homer's "A Fresh Breeze" shows two women from the village of Cullercoats carrying baskets. Their faces are wrapped in cloth, their sleeves rolled up without ceremony, and they walk with steady, unhurried purpose. There is no sign that they intend to yield to the force of nature — even if what awaits them at the end of the road is the same labor they have performed their entire lives.

Homer's "The Life Line," meanwhile, depicts a man rescuing an unconscious passenger from a shipwreck. On the open sea, all that sustains life is a rope and a pair of straining arms. Nothing is visible but waves, yet the man holds on and does not let go, does not slip, does not give up. Neither canvas offers any clear hope, nor any trace of romance. And yet Homer painted every one of these figures with an unyielding dignity.

Must life have meaning only when we are chasing hope?

Is a journey that takes the moment itself as its purpose — without hope as a means — not also meaningful? Human beings, it turns out, can live on love for family, attachment to home, and pride in their work. They can rise even without holding fast to some grand dream or goal. Homer's painting had changed, then, but his philosophy of painting had not. He was still making pictures of forward motion — only deeper ones. He had simply dug further into the concept of hope, and looked at its shape from a wider angle.

Can "The Gulf Stream," then, also be called something more than merely a painting of despair?

The scene is undeniably bleak. The waves look ready to swallow the small boat whole, and the sharks open their jaws in anticipation of prey about to fall. And yet the man is still on the boat. He could bury his head in his hands in terror, or cry out in grief — but he does not. He looks at the sea. He cannot do anything, or change anything, and yet he keeps thinking, as if still turning over what might yet be possible. Paradoxically, it is precisely this act that keeps the door of life from closing entirely. Even a one-in-a-thousand, one-in-ten-thousand chance of a miracle is not extinguished. Seen in this light, might this painting ultimately be read as a picture of hope as well — even if that hope is paved not with flowers but with thorns? Whether Homer intended exactly this, of course, cannot be known.

This is what Homer said when a viewer asked about the narrative of "The Gulf Stream." And then there is the faint outline of a ship visible in the upper left of the canvas — added, it is said, during revisions after the painting was otherwise complete. Some analysts say this too was intended to soften the desolate atmosphere, to ensure his "message" would not be misread.

As he entered the final years of his life, Homer found himself saddled with this nickname.

He lived and painted quietly at Prouts Neck. His mother — an amateur watercolorist who had first opened his eyes to art and remained his closest companion throughout his life — died in 1884. His father, a hot-tempered businessman, died in 1898. With each loss, Homer raised the walls of his isolation higher. Apart from a few trips taken to escape the brutal winters at Prouts Neck, he spent nearly all of his remaining time there. The New York Evening Post described him as "one of the most original (distinctive) figures among American painters."

"Right and Left" — the painting Homer made near the very end of his life — remains a subject of divided interpretation in academic circles to this day.

A hunter fires a shotgun. The shot is aimed at a pair of goldeneye ducks just beginning to take flight. The male on the left strains with everything it has to keep rising into the sky. The female on the right dips her neck and chooses to descend back into the water. The hunter's figure is barely visible. At first glance the female appears to be in mortal danger, but the clues — wounds, traces of blood — that would confirm this are hard to make out. Whether she has been hit or has dodged the shot, whether she has lost consciousness or is simply fleeing the danger in her own way, all of it remains ambiguous. The background, too — dawn or dusk, cloud or fog — is indistinct.

What is Homer trying to say? Having spent a lifetime probing the shape and angle of hope, what conclusion did he reach through the image of two ducks poised on the boundary between life and death? Perhaps this: that life itself, and hope itself, have no single correct answer — that each person finds their own way. Homer was also once asked about the direction of the largest wave in the painting and the cause of the smaller ripples around it — a question that, depending on his answer, might have offered a glimpse into his intentions. His response, however, was never recorded.

Homer suffered a stroke in 1908.

It left him with temporary difficulties in speech and muscle function. He recovered enough to complete works including "Right and Left," but his regained health did not last. He died in 1910, at the age of seventy-four, in his studio at Prouts Neck.

Homer's words, and the paintings he left behind, were regarded in their time as among the most quintessentially American aphorisms of the age.

The world does not always offer a fair wind. Sometimes the road closes, the sail tears, and a hurricane descends on top of everything else. Yet as long as one holds on to some form of hope — any form at all — life does not close. There was a time when only the flower-lined path seemed worth having; but living through it all, one finds that the thicket has its own value too. Perhaps that is what Homer, without ever saying so directly, was trying to say.

Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation, University of California Press

Cross, William R., Winslow Homer: American Passage. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Griffin, Randall C., Winslow Homer: An American Vision, London: Phaidon Press