A man lies on the deck of a small boat with a broken mast, the sea heaving around him. Sharks circle, a waterspout rises in the distance, and a ship is just visible on the horizon. Winslow Homer painted The Gulf Stream in 1899 and reworked it later, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought it in 1906.
The painting came from Homer's trips to the Bahamas and Florida, where he painted the sea in watercolor. He lived in Maine, and he knew what the ocean could do. The Gulf Stream turns those observations into a larger, darker picture of risk, with sugar cane on the deck and the blue water full of life and danger.
Viewers were troubled by it from the start. The man looks toward the horizon, and it is not clear whether the ship will reach him. Homer did not want to explain. When asked about the man's fate, he is said to have replied half in jest that the man would be rescued.
The painting is now seen as one of the great American works about the sea, and as a picture where a Black sailor is the central figure of a story of survival, rather than a background character.
Homer's The Gulf Stream appears on our: