It's a watercolour.
In After the Hurricane, Bahamas Homer depicts a luckless man washed up on the beach, surrounded by fragments of his shattered craft. The splintered boat testifies to the severity of the hurricane, even as black clouds recede into the distance and sunlight begins to glimmer. Frothy whitecaps and a surprising stroke of emerald green in the middle distance suggest an ocean that is gradually calming itself. Homer used thin washes and fluid brushstrokes to render the waves, setting up a contrast to dry land, where he employed thickly applied opaque red and yellow pigments for the seaweed tossed upon the sand. Initially, Homer had painted the man’s arm bent at the elbow, cradling his head in a more lifelike way. Preferring to leave his physical condition ambiguous, he scraped away paint in the area of the elbow and foreshortened the arm.
