The Gulf Stream 1899
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
Oil on canvas; 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (71.4 x 124.8 cm)

Description:
"The Gulf Stream" was based upon studies made during Homer`s two winter trips to the Bahamas in 1884-5 and 1898-9. First exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1900, the picture was subsequently reworked and "improved" by the artist. Early photographs show changes to the sea and to the back of the ship, making the composition more dramatic and vivid. The painting was shown in this state at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1900-1, and then at M. Knoedler and Co. in New York, where the artist placed on the picture the record-asking price of $4,000. There were problems selling the work because of either its high price or its unpleasant subject matter. Homer may have reworked the painting again in the face of this criticism in order to add the rigger on the horizon that signals hope and rescue from the perils of the sea.

This seascape shows a black sailor on a boat that has lost its mast in stormy and shark-infested waters. A distant ship offers the possibility of rescue, but the man is looking in precisely the opposite direction. The boat itself contains two grimly symbolic shapes: a black cross near the bow; and a dark tomb-shaped hatch leading below (the hatch is actually referred to as a "tomb" in Herman Melville`s Moby Dick). Homer himself had traveled through the Gulf Stream to the Caribbean, but this image owes as much to a well-known nineteenth century painterly tradition of boats in distress, for example, Gericault`s Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) and Thomas Cole`s The Voyage of Life: Manhood (1842). When seen in relation to such earlier works, Homer`s painting addresses larger themes of human struggle and isolation and the indifference of nature. Because the Gulf Stream is a river-like current within the ocean, the title "The Gulf Stream" points to the archetypal association of a river (for example, in Cole`s paintings and in Twain`s Huckleberry Finn) with a life journey. In portraying a black man as representative of the human condition, Homer is clearly rejecting the more common tendency toward racial stereotyping in the nineteenth century. In his repeated portrayals of people or animals struggling for existence against an indifferent natural world, Homer shares the concerns of literary naturalism as it appears in the works of Stephen Crane and Jack London (see Cikovsky and Kelly 369-70, 382-83; Stephen Koja 124).