The story
Two sailors stand on a wet deck after a storm, taking a reading of the sun to fix the ship's position. Winslow Homer painted Eight Bells in 1886, and it belongs to a museum run by a high school, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
The gallery was the gift of Thomas Cochran, a New York banker and former pupil. He gave the school 50 American paintings in 1928, and in 1930 he offered money for a building, an endowment and a fund to buy art, so as to cultivate in the students, in his words, a love for the beautiful. The building, designed by the architect Charles Platt, opened in 1931 and was named for Keturah Addison Cobb, a friend of Cochran's. It has collected American art from the start, and admission is free.
The collection now runs past 29,000 objects. Alongside the Homer are Thomas Eakins's Salutat, a boxer raising his arm to the crowd as he leaves the ring, Whistler's Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge, a Thames view from his early London years, and Edward Hopper's Manhattan Bridge Loop, painted in 1928.
