1900, Winslow Homer, On a Lee Shore -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: On a Lee Shore is one of only three oils completed by the artist in 1900, suggesting his final thoughts on dramatic seascapes. Homer himself called it “a very excellent painting.” It pictures a schooner sailing in rough weather past the Prouts Neck rocks along the “lee shore”—that is, where the wind is fiercely blowing. Unusual in its square format, the powerfully realistic scene reveals how the artist’s acute interest in the fundamental drama of dangerous conflict between humans and nature intensified as he aged. The heightened naturalism of the work coupled with its tumultuous subject gave the eventual owner of the painting “the feeling that he might be washed out of his home at any moment.”
1900, Winslow Homer, On a Lee Shore -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: On a Lee Shore is one of only three oils completed by the artist in 1900, suggesting his final thoughts on dramatic seascapes. Homer himself called it “a very excellent painting.” It pictures a schooner sailing in rough weather past the Prouts Neck rocks along the “lee shore”—that is, where the wind is fiercely blowing. Unusual in its square format, the powerfully realistic scene reveals how the artist’s acute interest in the fundamental drama of dangerous conflict between humans and nature intensified as he aged. The heightened naturalism of the work coupled with its tumultuous subject gave the eventual owner of the painting “the feeling that he might be washed out of his home at any moment.”