1836 -1910 · Civil War, Atlantic and American autonomy

Children in the wind, heroic fishermen and threatening seas make Winslow Homer one of the most powerful observers of the American experience.

Winslow Homer was born in Boston in 1836 and died in Prout's Neck, Maine, in 1910. Trained as an apprentice lithographer, he first worked for illustration. During the Civil War, Harper's Weekly sent him to Union troops. His drawings of encampments, soldiers and daily life teach him to condense a complex scene into immediately readable gestures. Back in New York, Homer transposes this experience into painting. Rather than heroic battles, he shows the expectations, wounds, former slaves and social consequences of the conflict. In the 1870s, he painted American childhood, countryside and leisure with simplicity apparent. Breezing Up places a man and three boys in a small sailboat launched by a clear breeze: the balance of bodies, the stretched sail and the clear horizon combine learning, risk and confidence. Homer simultaneously became a master of watercolor. In 1881 -1882, his stay in Cullercoats, a fishing village in the north-east of England, transformed his art. Women waiting for boats, sailors at work and the climate of the North Sea gave his figures a new monumentality. Then installed in Prout's Neck, he built his workshop facing the Atlantic and gradually reduced the story to concentrate the confrontation between human beings, rock and water. THE Herring net shows two fishermen holding their frail boat while pulling an abundant catch; the common effort responds to the movement of the swell. The Gulf Stream pushes the tension to the extreme: a black man drifts on a dismasted boat, surrounded by sharks under stormy skies, while an almost imperceptible ship remains in the distance. Travels to the Bahamas, Cuba, Florida and Bermuda renew his palette and his understanding of tropical light. Independent of schools and fashion effects, Homer gives oil, watercolor and illustration a concise force where nature is never a setting, but a power that experiences courage and solitude. There selection "Winslow Homer" notably compares The Gulf Stream and Breezing Up /A Fair Wind. His reading favors figures.

Homer removes everything that weakens the scene: there remains a body, a boat, the wind and the decision to hold on.