Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) by Winslow Homer

Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) by Winslow Homer

A good day on the water

The boat heels hard over, its bow lifted and spray breaking at the stern. Three boys and a man ride it out: one boy sits at the stern with the tiller, looking ahead under a broad hat; another sits up in the middle; a third leans back near the mast; the man, in a red shirt, lies low in the bottom of the boat. The name Gloucester is painted across the stern. Beyond them the sea is empty but for a schooner under sail at the right and a single gull, and the sky is full of broken, drifting cloud.

Three years in the making

Homer began the canvas in New York in 1873, after a summer at Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he took up watercolour in earnest and made the sketches the picture grew from. He worked on it for three years. He finished it in 1876, the centennial year, and showed it at the National Academy of Design and then at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Homer had called it A Fair Wind; the name Breezing Up came later.

Where it hangs

The painting is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which acquired it in 1943. It measures 61.5 by 97 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: National Gallery of Art, Washington · Wikidata Q4960357 · Wikimedia Commons