Northeaster (painting)

Northeaster is one of several paintings on marine subjects by the late-19th-century American painter Winslow Homer. Like The Fog Warning and Breezing Up, he created it during his time in Maine.[1] It is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Viewers are presented a struggle of elements between the sea and the rocky shore.[2] Winslow Homer excelled in painting landscape paintings that depicted seascapes and mountain scenery. [3][4]

Northeaster
ArtistWinslow Homer
Year1895 (1895)
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions87.6 cm × 128 cm (34.5 in × 50 in)
LocationMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, US
Accession10.64.5
Websitewww.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/11130

Background and description

After extensive travel, Homer settled in Prouts Neck, Maine. He had a studio built for him, which was completed in 1884, and painted marine subjects, including the hard lives of the fishermen and their families. He increasingly chose to depict the sea itself, and was especially attracted to stormy seas. During this period he painted a wide array of seascapes such as The Gulf Stream (1899), Moonlight – Wood's Island Light (1886), Northeaster (1895) and Early Morning After a Storm at Sea (1902). Many of his paintings depict the battlefront of the sea and the shore, and the waves crashing onto the rocky shore. It has been said that they "are among the strongest expressions in all art of the power and dangerous beauty of the sea".[5] Northeaster shows the waves while the Northeaster blows. Northeasters are storms along the upper East Coast of the United States that derive their name from the direction of the wind as it rotates onto land. The painting dates from 1895, but Homer reworked it by 1901.[6][2][7]

Provenance

Northeaster was at M. Knoedler and Company of New York in 1895 and then in 1895–96 with Thomas B. Clarke, also in New York. It was then returned to Homer in Maine. In 1900 it was again with Knoedler. From 1901 to 1910 it was owned by George A. Hearn, also of New York, who gave it to the Metropolitan Museum.[6]

References
  1. "Winslow Homer". Encyclopedia of World Biography. The Gale Group Inc. 2004.
  2. Prown, Jules David; The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (May 30, 2018). "Winslow Homer". Encyclopædia Britannica. {{cite encyclopedia}}: |author2= has generic name (help)
  3. Fabrikant, Geraldine (September 2, 2009). "Winslow Homer's Maine". The New York Times.
  4. Simkin, John (August 2014). "Winslow Homer". Spartacus Educational.
  5. Goodrich, Lloyd (1959). Winslow Homer (PDF). George Braziller, Inc. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2014-12-11.
  6. "Northeaster". Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  7. Hoover Giese, Lucretia (2005). "Meeting the New Century: Winslow Homer's Drawing after Northeaster". Visual Resources. 21 (4): 347–362. doi:10.1080/01973760500298146. S2CID 192033304 – via ResearchGate.

Further reading
  • Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Winslow Homer, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1990, pp. 11–13, ISBN 0-8109-1193-0
  • Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002, p. 9, ISBN 0-520-22725-5
  • Randall C. Griffin, Winslow Homer: An American Vision. Phaidon Press, New York, 2006, ISBN 0-7148-3992-2
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