The Fog Warning

By 1885 Winslow Homer had left New York and settled on a rocky point in Maine called Prout's Neck, among the fishermen whose work he watched every day. Halibut fishing was among the deadliest jobs on that coast. Schooners sailed miles out, then sent men off alone in small flat-bottomed boats called dories to chase the catch. Homer's fisherman has his fish, two big halibut in the stern, but he has turned his head toward the horizon where his ship is now only a black speck, and a bank of fog is rolling in between them. Homer never tells you whether he makes it back. He painted two other Prout's Neck fishing scenes that same year, and this one he first showed under the plain title Halibut Fishing.