Der Golfstrom

Winslow Homer had been visiting the Bahamas and Florida through the 1880s and 1890s, watching the water with a fisherman's eye. In 1899 he brought that knowledge to this scene: a Black sailor stretched on the deck of a small boat that has lost its mast and rudder, adrift in a heaving sea off the reefs, sharks circling in the swell below. Homer knew sharks well enough to get their anatomy right, unlike the monsters in earlier sea paintings. Critics found it grim and melodramatic when it first showed. Years later, pressed about the man's fate, Homer answered impatiently that the fellow would be rescued. Far off on the right horizon he had in fact added a faint ship, the one hint of rescue in the picture.