Vento Fresco

Winslow Homer had made his name drawing the Civil War for the illustrated papers, soldiers in camp and under fire. A decade later he was painting this, a catboat called the Gloucester heeling over in a stiff breeze off the Massachusetts coast, a man and three boys and the day's catch aboard. He began it in 1873 from sketches made at Gloucester and kept reworking it until 1876, the year the United States marked its hundredth birthday. It first hung at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, so this bright, forward-leaning boat met crowds who had come to take stock of a young country a decade out of a brutal war. One of the boys grips the tiller and looks ahead, toward open water beyond the frame.