Survivors at Sea

The romanticized survival-sea narrative is a theme that has been depicted and re-imagined in many different forms in oil on canvas Romantic art since the 18th Century. Its heroic and extreme nature lends itself easily to exciting narrative artwork that can be told in many different ways. These artists were interested in using the elements of dire circumstances, impending danger, and human resilience to tell stories of historical or mythological events. Two other important distinctions of the genre are the progression in the characterization of black figures in the subject matter of the pieces and the depiction of the sea as a wild, tumultuous, and menacing force with an amoral character all its own. These distinctions unite the motif through its different purposes of creation and variations in style. Building on the past work and influences of early and contemporary artist’s paintings of sea-survival narratives, Winslow Homer creates The Gulf Stream, a piece that is both fully heroic survival narrative and at the same time counter-cultural in what is says about its subject matter and about societal conventions of the time period. This exhibition will examine the progression of the sea-survival narrative from the 18th to late 19th centuries explore how the techniques and symbols that the artists use to tell historical narrative influenced and ultimately shaped the nature of Homer’s masterpiece.

 

John Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778, 

Oil on Canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Americas Collection, 89.481

Copley based the scene of this romanticized painting on the historical event of Brook Watson’s being attacked by a shark and losing his leg in Havana harbor, Cuba in 1749. A longboat full of sailors attempts to rescue Watson and ward off an enormous shark attempting to devour him whole. Among those in the boat is a black man, who is positioned towards the back as a secondary actor in the drama. The piece has many fictionalized and imaginative elements, such as the lack of blood from the loss of Watson’s leg and the humorous depiction of the shark as having lips. Realism is not the focus, but rather the heroism of the foremost white sailors in their frantic efforts to save Watson. The savage nature of the monster intent on devouring Watson is a symbol of the sea as a place that is without pity for the plight of the man whose rescue is still unassured. Homer mirrors the looming shark image and critics this depiction of the role of each sailor.

Theodore Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819, 

Oil on Canvas, The Louvre, French Painting Collection, INV. 4884 

In this dramatized interpretation of a highly publicized sea disaster, Theodore Gericault uses color, controversy, and drama to produce a dramatic piece that would bring him much fame and be the pivotal work that marked the early Romantic Movement. This scene, which depicts the disastrous plight of the survivors of the French ship Meduse which sank of the coast of West Africa in 1816, was all the more morbidly fascinating to people at the time because of its cannibalistic element and miraculous rescue. Gericault’s intense effort to achieve a realistic depiction of the raft and his dramatic light and dark contrast mixed with the somber brown palette shows the dire situation of the languishing survivors, who are finally being filled with hope after glimpsing a ship in the distance. Among the survivors shown is a black man who is obscured behind the others and plays no important or central role in the piece. Gericault’s focus, in contrast to Homer’s, was to create a controversial work of a socially recognizable event, though they both share the use of a distant ship as an image of hope.

Eugene Delacroix, The Barque of Dante, 1822, 

Oil on Canvas, The Louvre, French Painting Collection, INV. 3820

Delacroix creates a fantastical scene from Dante’s Inferno in which Dante and the Greek poet Virgil are crossing the river of death called Styx that is teems with tormented souls of the damned, who attempt to pull them down into hell with them. The scene is dark and chaotic, full of fire and smoke that is only clear only around the floundering boat, a lone symbol of hope amidst a sea of despair. While this piece is in many ways of a completely different nature than that of Homer’s, we can still see the influence it had on his piece in how the large and looming body of the shark in The Gulf Stream mirrors the composition of the long, arching figure of the wretched soul that rears above the water, illuminated in the foreground of Delacroix’s piece.

Joseph William Turner, Slave Ship, 1840,

 oil on canvas,  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Europe Collection, 99.22

The setting sun illuminates a chaotic ocean scene that bears witness to the terrible atrocity that has been committed by the slave ship which has thrown overboard its slaves and now recedes into the background with sails furled, preparing to meet the wrath of the approaching hurricane. Hands can be seen reaching above the waves in desperate attempt of survival, but their shackles drag them down to towards death and the fish that are moving in to devour them. The sea creatures and sinking slaves have few defined borders and blur with the background of fading red sun, as if to show that this sin will be forgotten to history, known only to God and the perpetrators. Turner’s piece, though not a survival at sea narrative in a compositional sense, shares themes with the style and deeply influences the meaning and subject matter of Homer’s work, specifically its central slavery and storm themes.

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899, 

Oil on Canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection,  06.1234

A lone black man drifts on a storm-wrecked boat, abandoned in the midst of a tumultuous ocean. His craft is harassed by sharks with open jaws, and as a storm approaches, this castaway steels his face and sets his gaze toward the coming danger with a look that communicates nothing but fierce determination. This is the scene Homer gives us in The Gulf Stream, using a dramatic blue color palette and thick strokes that give a choppy and weathered element to the painting. The influences of earlier artists themes are seen through the use of a distant ship as a symbol of hope that references Gericault’s usage, the looming sharks as images of imminent doom reflecting similar uses by Copley and Delacroix. The impending storm element of Turner is also one such influence, though Homer more significantly builds on Turner’s critic of slavery by making the black man a heroic figure, going against American societal stereotypes of blacks being inferior in moral character. Homer breaks from tradition in his rejection of survival-sea narrative based on historic events, and chooses instead to tell a story that will carry across the restrictions of history and reach the viewer in their own time and place.