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Formal Analysis of a painting specifically the gulf stream by winslow homer...

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Research Paper The Gulf Stream was made by Winslow Homer on 1899, it was made with oil on canvas and its dimensions are 28 x 49 inches (Fig. 1). It depicts a man on a boat amidst a sea of sharks. He is wearing nothing but pants and has a serious facial expression because he is in a bad situation and has given up. The boat in bad condition, the mast and the sail are both damaged. The waves are violent due to the storm forming in the background. The sharks are encircling the man’s boat violently trying to get their prey, and there are numerous patches of blood in the sea. But they are not the only marine animals out there, there are also flying fish to the right of the boat. In the background is a ship shrouded by the distance representing hope of rescue. The dominant iconography that make up this scene is a situation of peril and defeat due to the broken boat he’s on and the storm that is approaching making things worse for the man. Yet, the man’s skin color is dark and the time this was made was in 1899 when slavery was still not abolished, so he may have escaped. In this paper, I will provide a brief biography of the artist and discuss three events that led to the creation of this painting. I will describe the focal points of this work and from research explain their symbolism. Homer was born in Boston. According to H. Barbara Weinberg who wrote “Winslow Homer (1836-1910)” for the website The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Winslow Homer (18361910) is regarded by many as the greatest American painter of the nineteenth century.”1 His last destination was at Prout’s Neck, Maine, where he stayed until his death.2 Homer lived a productive life as an artist and has produced many works of art that carry on his legacy. The Gulf Stream which was made in 1899 wasn’t just made out of the blue, it took inspiration. According to “The Gulf Stream” on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History in the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, Homer was inspired by “one of his winter visits to the Bahamas.”3 The Bahamas are near the actual oceanic current known as the gulf stream. Homer was inspired by what he saw in the Bahamas and decided to implement it to his artwork. Also in Lloyd Goodrich’s Winslow Homer, it states, Homer was inspired by the views of the sun, tropics, brilliant blues of the Gulf Stream, and above all the negro inhabitants.4 A specific scenario that really inspired Homer was “when he had done a watercolor of a dismasted sloop wallowing in the sea, with a school of sharks hovering hungrily about it. Four years later, perhaps with an oil in mind, he combined this sketch and another 1885 one in a watercolor of the same boat, this time with a negro aboard.”5 This ties with the fact that he was inspired by what he saw in the Bahamas. The outside format of the canvas is a horizontal rectangle. The size of the canvas is medium-large and comparable to a medium sized coffee table. The boat is the same size as my tablet. The man on the boat is the same size as a router. And the sharks are the same size my fan. The abstract elements have significant meaning. The sharks’ expressions are humanlike, the main shark with his mouth wide open is exaggerated to show how fierce of a creature it is. Another abstract element is the exaggeratedly large tornado/storm in the background, it represents impending doom and further trouble for the man that is shipwrecked. 1 H. Barbara Weinberg, “Winslow Homer (1836-1910),” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, last modified March 5, 2017, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/homr/hd_homr.html. 2 Weinberg, “Winslow Homer (1836-1910).” 3 Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, “The Gulf Stream,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, last modified March 5, 2017, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/06.1234/. 4 Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944) 88. 5 Goodrich, Winslow Homer 162.

However, there is simplification evident in the piece as well, the ship in the background that is shrouded in mystery makes use of that abstract technique. However, there are representations of realism. The sea is very realistic, the waves obey the rules of physics and are crashing all over the place as expected during a storm. The sea represents the situation of being trapped. And the damaged boat is very realistic, it depicts the parts of a real-life boat from the mast to hull. The painting has asymmetrical and dynamic compositions. Asymmetry, due to the left side outweighing the right side because there are more elements that catch the eye. The waves in the background are more emphasized on the left, and the shark in the foreground with its mouth wide open reaches out to the audience. The dynamic aspect is that your eyes keep moving. The boat’s contrast from the sea leads the viewer to looking at the man then the sharks, the sharks are in the water so it guides us to the water as well, and eventually you start to notice all the bits of details like the storm in the background, the blood, etc. The perspectives used are overlapping and atmospheric. Overlapping because everything besides the ship and the storm in the background overlaps the sea, the shark closest to the boat in the middle ground symbolically and menacingly overlaps the boat. Atmospheric perspective is seen in the ship shrouded in the distance in the background. The ship has less clarity than the rest due to how far away it is depicted. The main color palette is mixed. The sea is a cool mixture of different shades of blue and green, which are the dominant hues. The sharks, the storm, and the atmosphere share a common hue of gray and white. In contrast to the cooler hues there are warm colors too. The brown and white boat plays a key part in contrast to the vast sea since it is an emphasized spot. The man on the boat is varied from the cool hues as well, he has a dark complexion and is warm hued. There are numerous patches of blood which contrast from the sea and stand out. The sharks are shown in a light hue just like some parts of the waves in the ocean, so they stand out. And the sky has a very light egg-shell type of color that is contrasted from the darkness of the ocean. The three focal points are the man and his boat, the sharks, and the storm, but there are numerous others as well. The boat is the main focal point since it is directly in the middle ground but it is strongly tied to the second and third focal points, the sharks, and the storm. They add to the overarching idea of being in the worst-case scenario. The boat’s mast and sail is damaged which means that it’s going nowhere and is stranded at sea. There are sugarcanes falling out of the hold or storage and the boat is swaying on the accord of the ocean, it’s not going anywhere besides where the ocean takes it. The boat has writing on it that says “Anna-Key West”, it is the boat’s name. The man in a laid down position is wearing nothing but tattered pants and has a serious expression on his face. The man’s skin color is dark and the time this was made was in 1899 when slavery was still not abolished, so he may have escaped. He regrets this journey and is looking off into the direction he came from and has given up hope. There is a lot of symbolism just on this boat that can be derived from. The boat itself represents hope being shattered because the mast and sail aren’t working so it’s just dead weight at sea but it’s the only thing left to support the man from the perils of the sea which in this case are the sharks and the storm. It is a broken boat taken from the real world and plopped into the plot. The boat symbolizes the only thing left to cling on to surrounded by all the problems surrounding it. To further debrief the symbolism behind the boat and the man, Paul Staiti Who wrote, “Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics” for American Art, mentions that the man on the boat is African American to represent the predicament of how they were

treated during that period.6 Staiti also mentions the “brooding face and passive strength of the black man, both signs of Homer's humanitarianism and his under- standing of the long-suffering pathos of Africans in the New World.”7 Homer had an empathetic view towards the racial interactions of Africans, which were usually rough since they were discriminated towards. The boat on the other hand is “equally passive”8 as the black man. The sharks are spread out near the boat but the main ones that are seen are the three closest to the boat ranging from the middle ground to the foreground. The shark with its mouth wide open is very hungry and wants to hunt down its prey which is the man on the boat. One of the sharks is trying to tip over the boat with its head to get to its meal quicker. The sharks are massive and very intimidating predators. They symbolize imminent death, in this case it’s the man’s life that is hanging in the balance. Staiti mentions that the sharks represent white supremacy against African American society that grips them in society and affects they were looked upon.9 During the 1800s times were tough for African Americans and it was a time of turmoil also due to the Civil War. The final focal point is the objects in the background, the storm on the left and the faint ship on the right. The storm is huge, it goes from sea level to the sky and the boat is heading towards it. The storm is the cause of the violent behavior of the sea and is an added situation for the man. The storm itself symbolizes danger just like the sharks and strips away all hope for the man. However, the ship shrouded in mystery poses a sign of hope because it has the potential to rescue the stranded man. The storm is a representation of nature’s power and thermodynamics that can strip away man into just matter,10 nature doesn’t discriminate is what is meant by this. The painting is called The Gulf Stream because it is taking place in the Gulf Stream itself. The Gulf Stream is an oceanic current that is strong, warm, and fast. It’s a potent site of formation of cyclones due to the contrasting temperature with the water. There are many elements that prove that it is depicting the actual Gulf Stream. For starters, there’s a boat in the middle of the ocean which means that there is a relation to the sea. On top of that there is clearly a cyclone in the background which is common in the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is a dangerous current and the man on the boat is stranded at sea due to its severity. The Gulf Stream is near South America and the sugarcanes on the boat depicts cargo from there since sugarcanes are abundant in South America. The man’s skin color is also dark and the time this was made was in 1899 when slavery was still not abolished, so he may have escaped. There are lots of evidence that this painting depicts the Gulf Stream and it does it evidently from all the elements that are carefully made. In this paper I provided a brief biography of the artist and I described the focal points of this work and from research explained their symbolism.

6 Paul Staiti, “Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics,” American Art, Vol.15, No.1 (Spring, 2001) 24. 7 Staiti, “Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics,” 26. 8 Staiti, “Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics,” 26. 9 Staiti, “Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics,” 24. 10 Staiti, “Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics,” 26.

Bibliography Goodrich, Lloyd, Winslow Homer. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1994. Staiti, Paul, “Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics.” American Art, vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring, 2001) 10-33. “The Gulf Stream,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Last modified March 5, 2017. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/06.1234/. Weinberg, H. Barbara, “Winslow Homer (1836-1910),” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, last modified March 5, 2017, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/homr/hd_homr.html.

Fig.1: Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899, Oil on canvas, 28 x 49 inches...