Driftwood

On 30 November 1909 a new canvas from Homer reached his New York dealers, Knoedler, and it sold the same day, to the Brooklyn collector Frank Babbott. Homer was 73. On the stretcher he had first written another title, Spoon Drift, the sailors' word for spray torn off the tops of waves, and then settled on Driftwood, which turns attention to the log.

A lone man stands on the rocks with his back to us, a rope around a huge tree trunk the sea has thrown up, while the surf fills most of the picture and a gull hangs at the right. It was the last canvas Homer finished. He may have remembered a picture shown in New York in 1900, The Driftwood Gatherer by the landscape painter Frederick Kost, in which a man hauls in a timber from the waves. Homer died the following September, and the museum bought Driftwood in 1993.