The great American artist Winslow Homer was 63 years old when he painted The Gulf Stream. This painting is one of several works created in the last ten years of the artist's life. It is an oil-on-canvas painting, but he also made several sketches and two variants of the painting in watercolors. In 1889, when Homer painted this, it is suggested that the painting was an understanding or synopsis of his lifetime of experiences, deepened by adversity, and the recognition of his own mortality, combined with memories and reflections.
Homer was a frequent visitor of Nassau and Florida, and in 1898, passing through The Gulf Stream once more, may have inspired him to reflect on previous paintings that he had created. It is also suggested that a Bahamian story, Mc Cabe’s Curse, a tale of a British captain who was robbed by thieves and survived a storm, may have also inspired this painting. Because of his father's death the previous year, he might have been feeling quite alone, abandoned, vulnerable, and contemplating his own end.
Homer's The Gulf Stream depicts a well-defined fishing boat, which is small, rudderless, and without a mast or sails, in a very violent seascape and sky. The man is alone on the boat, surrounded by sharks and a waterspout in the right-hand background. Even though the boat is rocking to one side, the man seems relatively calm, looking out to the sea. The gray and blue shades of the tumultuous waves are splashed with red brushstrokes, perhaps as a foreshadowing of what might happen, should the man be washed into the sea. Afar is a very vague form of a ship is seen, oblivious to the man on the disabled boat, and the scene is bathed in light, using lighter shades of grays and creamy colors.
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