The Fog Warning
This conversation is connected to The Fog Warning.
A fisherman rows a dory through heavy swells, alone on the open sea. A large halibut lies in the bottom of the boat, its white belly and tail visible over the gunwale. The man looks back over his shoulder toward the horizon, where a schooner is just visible in the distance, small against a bank of fog and dark cloud. The question the painting asks is whether he'll make it back to the ship before the fog closes in. The sea is gray-blue and green, the swells steep enough to hide the schooner behind them, and the sky is already going. Homer spent the summer of 1884 in the fishing village of Prouts Neck, Maine, and began painting the working life of the Grand Banks fishermen with the same unsentimental directness he'd brought to his Civil War illustrations twenty years earlier. The Fog Warning is one of the great American paintings of the 19th century, and the tension in it is entirely a matter of distance, weather, and time.